


the art of not knowing

by sepulchralsymphonies



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Post-Battle of Five Armies, BAMF Bilbo Baggins, Bilbo swears like a sailor, Consort Bilbo Baggins, Emotional Recovery, F/F, Fluff and Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, bard has a crush and he's the last one to know about it, bilbo and thorin's dynamic is adorable and i'm here for it, bilbo is a ruthless ruler, definitely just emotion based, he's so hot that everyone is losing their shit, in this house we love and support a thranduil redemption arc, more tags to be added later, picking up the pieces after the war, please dont expect politics im horrible at it, thats because theyre adults and crying is perfectly okay and healthy, thats it thats the whole plot, these characters are gonna address their trauma and talk about it and cry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:15:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 57,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24639793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sepulchralsymphonies/pseuds/sepulchralsymphonies
Summary: If you ask the mad king and his burglar what they think about destiny, they will laugh quietly, and then reach for each other’s hands.(Or the one where Bilbo is born to be a ruler, Thorin is saddled with a few unexpected friends, and their family is absolutely massive.)
Relationships: Bard the Bowman/Thranduil, Bilbo Baggins & Dwalin, Bilbo Baggins & Dáin Ironfoot, Bilbo Baggins & Thorin Oakenshield, Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield, Dwalin & Thorin Oakenshield
Comments: 135
Kudos: 315





	1. a long list of mortal enemies

**Author's Note:**

> “Eagles,” Thorin said, and let out a resigned sigh. “The fucking eagles, they’re at it again.”

Thorin Oakenshield has heard of the final moments in a person’s life. They’re supposed to be a montage, a collective documentation of all that has passed, of all that has been (perhaps, even all that _could_ be) in a flurry that lasts mere seconds, quick and effective, even a welcome respite from the crushing agony that death is said to bring along. The information never served to placate him before, for in light of all that he has been through, he feared that when his end came, it would be so long and so brutal that he would have time to revisit each and every one of his failures instead. As someone who defined himself by all that he could not achieve, by the people he lost instead of those he treasured, by the glory that shattered long ago and not the pride he refashioned along the way, Thorin feared fate would show a cruel hand yet again to wrench anguish into him, even when he lay dying and choking on his last breaths, lost to the world in the throes of delirium.

Some moments, however, were so certain to be included in his last that he could have set them down in stone the very minute they happened. Hearing the crackling snap of the flags in the roaring wind that brimmed with a promise of fire and flame, one his naïve young self didn’t know just yet; lying face-down in the dust, injured and dazed, while the fire-drake burst into their hallowed halls and peeled the crumbling flesh off the bones of his people; the mind-numbing terror of the moment his grandfather’s head came to rest at his feet, his eyes still wide open, staring blankly ahead as if in a strange trance; the slowly spreading stain along the front of his tunic as he held his brother’s broken body in his arms and cradled him to his chest, sobbing so hard that he almost forgot his own name, choking on his own tongue as he cried out, over and over again, _Frerin, please, wake up, please wake up, Frerin,_ please—

The happier ones were more enigmatic, so sudden and unexpected that they had blazed to life in his chest like a glorious forge, lighting him up from the inside and rumbling a comforting lull in his head, almost as if they quietly and gently reassured him that it was fine, it was all fine, they would be okay, he could rest now, he could stop and breathe. Holding his nephews for the first time in his trembling arms, Dìs clutching his sleeve as she sobbed in relief and sheer, unbridled happiness; watching his sister-sons, his _boys_ , grow into such strong and cheerful people that reminded him of Frerin so much it made him weep tears of a bittersweet joy; raising a hand to knock on a round green door that led to a strange house set into the hill; crushing a frail body to his chest and feeling his heart beat so loud that he feared his armour and his very soul would be rent if he pulled away—those moments were few, but fierce, and he knew he would die a happy death if he could experience them again, one last time.

All of that information had, of course, been a part of necessary whispered conversation between warriors such as themselves, all wrought with a bond of solidarity and brotherhood that ran bone-deep. It prepared them, brothers-in-arms, to a common show of strength, an unspoken promise of standing by each other’s sides in life and in death, to take wounds for each other and murmur heartfelt prayers once they departed this life for the next journey to their fathers’ halls. It was made sure they knew, all of them, what awaited them in battle. They could win or they could lose, but the mere thought that they would be able to remember their loved ones one last time was deemed enough. They were Dwarves, after all, and they loved fiercely and spectacularly. Even the opportunity of a few moments right before you fell through the void and into the unknown that lay beyond, moments where they could experience the glowing warmth of past comfort and companionship before the frigid doom took them, was consolation enough.

Thorin had come close to dying on occasions more than he could count. Dwalin could, however, and his oldest friend never stopped in reminding him just how stupid and reckless and utterly pig-headed he was when it came to the question of saving his own skin. They didn’t really see eye-to-eye on a few things, mostly notably a fair sense of self-preservation and keeping one foot out the door to the future instead. Thorin believed quite firmly in the here and now, for if he went to battle, how could anyone expect him to care about which councilors he would have to hear ramble on for four hours about the whys and hows of mercantile taxation when there wouldn’t be a city left to defend, anyway? Dwalin, on the other hand, was a staunch supporter of the fact that even if there wasn’t a city left to defend anymore, they were at the very least entitled to a King who wouldn’t go running off into the thick of war without caring whether his head was lopped off by a stray enemy warrior, and who would manage to stay alive long enough for them to figure out how to defend said city properly and take it back from whatever adversary had dared to challenge them again.

As he’d explained quite frequently before, Thorin really couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about it, and he probably never would.

With an entire lifetime spent hanging off the sleeves of battle-hardened warriors as a child and watching his own self become one of them from the sidelines with a detached sort of interest—as if the recognition and horror just refused to take root in his consciousness—Thorin had quite firmly ingrained the idea of death into his mind. If the Valar were merciful on him, _if_ he managed to remove even a fraction of the dishonor he’d brought to his kingdom by besmirching the memory of those they had lost and never even managed to give a proper funeral to, _if_ he managed to prove himself a good leader who gave his life to protect his people, _if_ he succeeded in restoring the shattered pride of Durin’s folk, _then_ perhaps his end would be a little less grisly. Perhaps he would be slain in a battle where he fell defending his kin; perhaps it would be when he threw himself in front of his friends or family ( _or beloved_ , a small voice whispered in his ear) to protect them in an ambush or attack. Perhaps it would be when he breathed his last on a deathbed in a shadowed room off a great hall, after living a long life where the children of his kingdom would know nothing but laughter and warmth and full bellies.

Of course, fantasizing about his own death wasn’t exactly the best way to pass his time, but then, Thorin had never claimed to have been the most sane of people anywhere. It was just a thought to him, one he’d long since made peace with, and he knew there wasn’t much he could do to change that.

So, when Thorin found himself sprawled across an unsteady slab of ice that danced and swayed and kept splashing cold water into his breeches with a gaping hole sliced into his foot and the face of his mortal enemy inches from his own, he realized that this was the end for him. A far-off corner of his brain reminded him that he had managed to amass far more mortal enemies in his life than anyone else ever had, and his collection was pretty diverse as well—a fire-breathing dragon, an Elvenking who had a foot long twig shoved up his arse, an Orc who had been thirsting for his blood from the moment he laid eyes on him, that one councillor from the Iron Hills whose daughter he had refused to marry and who had single-handedly launched a vendetta against him—the list just kept on going. Balin would probably have rattled off the names of the others because he was a vindictive bastard who found joy in irritating his King to death, but Balin wasn’t here now. Thorin was alone, and he was actually going to die.

Thorin’s arms shook as he strained to keep the pale Orc from skewering him like a stuck pig. The beast was probably hoping to hear him squeal like one too, but Thorin would rather bite off his own tongue than emit a sound anything lower than the deep timbre he had been gifted with once he came of age and still quite proudly boasted of on a regular basis. Thorin could almost hear the ominous creaking of his ribs shifting in his chest as Azog pressed down on him, his body positively screaming with the effort of holding Orcrist aloft as pain lanced through each and every fibre of his being.

With another mighty shove, the Orc’s blade came closer to his chest, and his heart began to beat a rather furious rumble in his chest. His lungs felt like they were shriveling up, his airways constricting as the sword came close and closer still, now hovering mere inches from his throat. Thorin kicked out his legs, trying to scrabble for purchase, but the ice made his boots slip no matter how hard he tried to keep himself steady, and he couldn’t free his hands to try any other manoeuvre. The thundering in his mind grew louder, all of his thoughts shutting down ominously, one by one, until the only thing he could focus on was the white of Azog’s pupils and the sunlight that glinted off the edge of his wicked blade.

Was it really worth prolonging his end? It wasn’t like there was anyone around left to chide him for giving up just a hair’s breadth from victory; and he was tired. He was so, _so_ exhausted. It was as if the fatigue of the last century had finally caught up to him, at the very moment that his body was about ready to give up on its own. His feet started to throb with the ache of walking hundreds of miles, seeking and begging for refuge; his legs started to cramp from the weight of the elderly that they had all offered to carry along the way; blisters popped into existence along the length of his arms from the forges he worked tirelessly all day, rivulets of sweat streaming down his furrowed brows as he tried not to let any stray sparks get to his face; his eyes started to flutter closed with all the sleep he had lost over the decades to the nightmares and the hunger and the clawing, omnipresent fear. It was always the bloody _fear_ ; he never quite managed to rid himself of it.

Thorin felt drained; boneless and insubstantial. His position at the moment was little more than a rag-doll, laid out limp and filled with straw as an overgrown and frightfully hideous demon instead of a child prodded and hacked away at his lifeless form. The ice was numbing as the chill spread through his aching body—Thorin could feel each and every slice, every bruise throbbing to life along the length of him as the cold began to creep into his head. His hair, a dank and damp curtain which would take a few decades to clean and comb properly, lay spread out under him, snagging on the edges of his armour and tangling in his open mouth. All in all, it could have been a lot worse. He could be missing a few limbs, an eye, a chunk of his trademark Durin nose, perhaps even his goddamned liver—but here he was, battered and bruised and bleeding, but still _whole_ ; or, at least, in some twisted sense of the word.

Looking up into Azog’s face hunched above him, his scarred visage alight with the sort of misplaced gleeful expression that would’ve made him hurl in disgust had he not been on the receiving end of it, Thorin was struck with an epiphany. They didn’t really need him anymore, his people. If he died right here and now, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. If they won the battle—and _Mahal_ , he begged that they did—then the Dwarves would still have their kingdom restored to them. Bard was a good, honest man, even if he had a miserably botched idea of what weapons were, and he would definitely support the Durins’ claim to the throne. Thranduil may have been a complete nutjob, but he was still just one King surrounded by a painfully persuasive Wizard and scores of Dwarves and Men who would do anything to see his sister and his nephews on the throne. He was not fool enough to voice his dissent in a sea of folk who would drown him if he dared to crest the waves in the other direction.

The thought of the three of them sent a fresh wave of agony smarting through him. The last Thorin had seen of Dìs, she had tucked herself into his chest the way she used to when she was a dwarfling, and sobbed so quietly that he could not have known she wept, had it not been for her tears soaking into his jerkin. Fìli and Kìli, however, he had seen on the ramparts of Ravenhill with Dwalin. Something decidedly wicked had whispered a promise in his ears, telling him this would be the last time he would see them, but Thorin had ruthlessly shut it down and barked at them to not leave each other’s sides, no matter what, and waited until he had seen them nod stiffly. Hell itself could have spat fire upon them then, but he had known Dwalin would lead his boys to safety on point of death, and for a moment as tense as that, it had been enough, for it _had_ to be enough. The four of them had parted ways then, with the icy winds whipping at their bodies with the force of knives tearing into flesh, and Thorin had made his way ahead alone, seeking out the monster that had ripped their family to shreds.

Yes, they would be fine, Thorin told himself, feeling a fresh wave of water lap against his knee as Azog moved closer with a snarl. His sister lived, his nephews were safe, Dàin had arrived, Thranduil and Bard were on their side, and the dragon was dead. Nobody needed him around anymore. Dìs had already proven herself a far better administrator than he, and with the support of the Company, she would raise Erebor to heights their ancestors had never even dared to dream before. They would be in good hands, for Tharkûn would be sure to help with what was left, and the Wizard would keep his family and his people safe.

 _And what of Bilbo_ , a traitorous part of his consciousness sneered, _will you desert him,_ again _, after everything he’s done for you and yours?_

Thorin let out a pained grunt, struggling to keep his elbows from snapping like kindle sticks under the Orc’s weight. Flashes of memory dashed through his mind like dust left in the wake of a rider’s stallion—wet curls sticking up in disarrayed tufts, fond laughter echoing through dim caverns; brass buttons dangling from a baggy waistcoat, a threadbare shirt sliding over skin so surprisingly smooth under his own trembling fingers, etching invisible patterns into the unblemished flesh, so unlike his own; eyes that shone three colours in the sun, far more glorious than any jewel he would ever gaze upon; the smallest of coughs as he let go of a pale throat, a slight figure slipping to the ground with a low gasp, frail and quiet, and so dreadfully heartbroken.

 _You unworthy swine_ , the voice reminded him with a derisive snarl, _you’ve doomed him to a lifetime of pain with your cowardice_.

“Thorin?”

When the sound of his own name suddenly swept towards him with the wind, for a moment, Thorin believed he had truly lost himself to the insanity. For what other reason could there be to hearing the voice of his beloved on the frigid air, the voice of one whom he would never be able to see again? A cruel trick of his addled mind and nothing more, he viciously reprimanded himself, trying not to let his heart beat too wildly in his chest with false assurances of comfort. He was here, well and truly alone, his death looming over him with a truly massive sword that was poised to ram through his throat and leave him pinned in a rather stupid looking way to the ice for the others to find.

Mahal, the Valar really despised him, didn’t they.

“ _Thorin_?”

The second time the voice came, much closer than before, Azog stiffened above him. Thorin, still lying flat on his royal arse and never one to care much about appearances, instantly let his jaw drop as he sucked in lungful after greedy lungful of air. He had been holding his breath the entire time, too terrified of giving his enemy leeway and a little too preoccupied with keeping his hands aloft to focus on trivial things like breathing evenly. The Orc’s head whipped back and forth quickly as he shifted back further along Thorin’s legs, his beady eyes raking over the empty expanse of the stone courtyard around them. Thorin was still trying not to choke on his own tongue to ponder the dynamics of the entire spectacle. He wasn’t dead yet, and that had to count for something.

“Step away from him, _now_.”

Thorin froze as he finally heard him, clear as day, and that was saying a lot, because he was drenched in water and lying sprawled across a floating slab of ice. “No,” he rasped, trying to lift himself onto his elbows. “ _No_!” He tried to wrangle his unresponsive body into a semblance of movement, the cloying terror seizing his throat in a vice-like grip. “Bilbo, _no_! Get out of here!”

At the sound of their burglar’s name, Azog turned back towards him with his mouth stretched out in a wordless snarl. Thorin lunged to hold Orcrist against his blade, his thoughts still scattered somewhere along the very same courtyard where he’d last heard the voice of his love—and distantly, he cursed himself quite colourfully for being so distracted as to not notice the bloody Orc perched on his legs like a foul worm—but the vermin raised his sword faster than he could blink, and brought it down in a swooping arc right across his chest.

Thorin fell back with a shout, the ache so strong that it reached into his very soul with spindly fingers, searching and prying and _clawing_ for blood. Steel parted fluidly in the wake of the great blade, his armour splitting like butter under the powerful blow. Light exploded behind his closed lids when his eyes screwed shut, so dizzying and disorienting that he felt his stomach turning with the intensity of it all. His mind rattled inside his skull, beating a pounding rumble so loud he was afraid his ears would soon start trickling blood. He curled up onto his side, dragging his knees up close to his chest, and all the while, he could only hear his heart tremble with a fear so profound he could taste it on his ashen tongue. _Why is he here, he shouldn’t be here, they were supposed to keep him safe, they were supposed to keep him_ away—

Thorin could hear noises in the distance, just a little way off. It sounded like a brief scuffle, with the occasional thuds and grunts, even a startled yelp at one point. He tried to wrench his eyes open, and almost on command, he began to cough, hacking up his lungs as the foul metallic tang of blood sprayed from his lips and onto the ice.

“ _Bilbo_ ,” he choked out, spitting a mouthful of blood off to the side. “Bilbo, you—”

A sudden wave of nausea hit him then, heavy and humongous, and Thorin rolled forward so he could try to throw up the measly remnants of his last meal. He couldn’t even remember when he had last eaten, couldn’t remember if he had sat around the fire with his friends or locked himself away in the Royal Chambers like a miserable old cricket; couldn’t recall if it had been a messy stew of nuts and dried meat because they’d run out of rations while they had been trapped inside the mountain for his _godforsaken_ spell of madness for far too long—and the thought sent him into a coughing fit, his mouth burning with the acrid taste of bile hurtling past his slack jaw. Thorin heaved, his chest sizzling at the edges of the gaping wound like someone was pressing a red-hot poker into his flesh with a vengeful rage. He dropped forward onto the ice, the slab rolling beneath his trembling limbs, a terrifying rivulet of red dribbling past his cracked lips and into his shorn beard.

Thorin hadn’t even realized his eyes had drooped shut, hovering in the strange land between the conscious and the unseen, but a sudden roar wrenched his eyelids open as if someone had physically ripped the two apart. The howl had been immediate, a quick, low bellow of sheer rage, and it cut off into a strange gurgle as suddenly as it had started. He recognized that voice, that _fury_ —he had experienced it far too often for his liking, and the dawning horror at the knowledge of his circumstances rammed into him with the force of a battering ram.

Thorin’s mouth twisted in terror, so blunt and encompassing that he felt its phantom fingers wrapping around his throat and squeezing the voice out of his mouth. “ _Bilbo_!” He shouted, growling in frustration as his efforts to push himself into a sitting position were thwarted by the stinging pain across his torso. He wriggled helplessly, his gloved hands heavy and weighed as he tried to search the ice for something, _anything_. “Bilbo, _no_ —”

“It’s a little too late to be telling me to leave, I’d say.”

Bilbo dropped down on his knees in front of him suddenly; appearing to Thorin’s dazed eyes as if out of thin air. He reached out a shaking hand—all scraped knuckles and bloodied fingers—and gently took one of Thorin’s own in his grasp.

“Hello, love,” he whispered quietly, with a wan sort of smile, looking pensive in response to the awestruck expression on the King’s bleeding face. “Don’t you look devilishly handsome.”

Thorin gasped in wake of the relief that flooded through him then. Bilbo was here. Bilbo was _here_ , and he was alive, and the sun backlit him in a way that made him look so dreadfully beautiful that the sharp pain radiating through him in that moment almost overshadowed the deep laceration in his flesh. His beloved looked positively _ethereal_ —fey and untouchable, so far away from the mad king that lay slumped across his feet that it was almost laughably ironic how their roles had once been reversed in Thorin’s crazed mind. Back then, he had believed himself supreme, the restored King of noble birth, unchallenged and unequal, all but for the one he sought to make his consort and keep at his side for all to see, but never to touch. Here he lay now, broken and bleeding at the feet of the very person he had scorned, dying a slow death in the most disgraceful manner possible, and he couldn’t even muster up the words to beg for his forgiveness.

“Have you not heard, my ghivashel,” Thorin choked out at last, squeezing his fingers tight in his own, afraid he was going to pull away at any moment now and clinging desperately to him as if he was the last tether that held him to this world. “It is considered terribly rude, lying to a man on his deathbed.”

Bilbo looked stricken for a long moment, a host of emotions playing across his dirt-streaked face; then he steeled his jaw. “It’s quite fortunate you aren’t dying then,” he declared, schooling his features in a reassuring smile. “So you can stay quiet and keep your dramatics to yourself, for now.”

Thorin shook his head as a freezing draft of wind dashed over them. “Delusions do not suit you, my heart,” he said softly, rubbing his thumb over the sooty knuckles of the Hobbit’s hand. “You must be the more sensible of the two of us now, I am afraid.”

“You insult me by comparing my wit to yours,” Bilbo pointed out with an indignant huff, and the motion was so reminiscent of old times around the fire with the Hobbit curled lazily in his arms as they exchanged teasing barbs back and forth that Thorin’s face cracked into a strained smile, “which is why you absolutely _must_ listen when I tell you, o son of Thraìn, that you are not going to die.”

“It is my time,” Thorin told him as gently as he could, his breath stuttering around a ragged inhale. “Denying it will not make the process easier.”

“That’s a load of crock and you know it,” Bilbo shot back with a snort, his tongue still tempered to that razor edge he never failed to employ in flaying others alive, “so why don’t you just shut up and let me do the thinking?”

“You’re too bossy for your own good, you know,” Thorin remarked, hastily swallowing down a rising cough. The lingering itch in his throat persisted, and he tried to gulp down the sickening copper of his own blood. He bit down a pained grunt as Bilbo leaned down deftly to slip his arms around his chest, his knees carefully braced by Thorin’s side. “ _Ow_. Easy there, dear heart, or do you want my innards spilled all over your lovely coat?”

“Thick as an ox, and twice as heavy,” Bilbo grumbled in mock annoyance, although his grip considerably softened. He shifted his arms to grip the sides of Thorin’s wrecked chestplate, his mouth thinning in barely concealed distress as he very politely tried not to stare at the wound that nearly severed it in half. “Do you want me to drag you to the side bit by bit, or all at once?” He asked pertly, but his voice wavered.

Thorin winced as the cruel blade of irony pierced his flesh yet again. “I,” he started, and then tried not to gag around a breath, “I do not think there is any point to it.”

Bilbo’s eyes hardened. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I am sorry,” Thorin told him in a hushed whisper, “but I truly do not think it is important.”

His Hobbit’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Not important?” He repeated in a disbelieving tone, high and annoyed. “ _Not important_? Thorin, is this what _you_ would have done?” He demanded, curling a hand imperatively around the join of his neck and shoulder, and Thorin politely didn’t point out the fact that his fingers were shaking like a leaf caught in autumn winds. “Had you found _me_ , wounded and bleeding, would you have left me where I was? Not even tried to see what you could do to help?”

“No,” Thorin breathed. “No, never.”

“So, why don’t you shut your trap and answer my question,” Bilbo thundered, although the flames of his fury in his eyes quelled visibly. He inhaled swiftly and quickly, and then shook his head with a tight-lipped expression. “Now,” he said, and plastered on a cheerful look on his harrowed face. “Do you want to lie here and keep getting jostled like one of those awful boats I’ve seen on the Brandywine, or do you want to help me move you off to the side?”

“Help you move me off to the side, please,” Thorin said quietly, but his voice was hoarse and it cracked on the last word.

Bilbo nodded decisively, his chin jutting proudly, but the corners of his lips wobbled once as his eyes drifted down to the gaping wound across Thorin’s chest. He knew it was bleeding, although the flow had slowed to a lazy bubbling, but if the pale look on Bilbo’s face was anything to look by, it wasn’t a pretty sight to gaze upon. The Hobbit hesitated, as if weighing something in his clever little mind, so swiftly that Thorin could almost hear the gears whizzing in the space between them. He furrowed his brows after a moment. “Ghivashel? Is everything—”

Bilbo darted down and pressed his lips against Thorin’s mouth.

He pulled back entirely too soon for Thorin to do anything but splutter in surprise, too thrown by the myriad emotions crashing through his head to grasp at any one in particular. “This is going to hurt,” he whispered against his forehead, and pasted another kiss to the feverish skin. “Try not to squeal.”

Thorin drew back in the circle of Bilbo’s arms with a scandalized look. “I do _not_ —”

The sound he made then was one Thorin would later describe as a deep, resonant, respectful and _very_ masculine expression of a mind-numbing pain that stemmed from the massive gash across his chest—from which he was in danger of bleeding to death, thank you very much. Bilbo, however, hastily suppressed a cough which sounded rather suspiciously like a half-crazed giggle and received a piercing glare for his troubles. He didn’t even bother to deign it with a response (or say, kiss him again, just for the sake of shutting him up or something, of course); he simply grabbed Thorin under the arms and _hauled_ , like he was an unwilling sack of those potatoes he was always on about whenever he talked about the Shire.

In another dimension and reality, or maybe in a different time, Thorin would have marveled at the strength that was coursing through the Hobbit’s naturally gentle limbs as he dragged him across the slab of ice with swift and strong tugs, pulling him along inch-by-precious inch as they advanced. Thorin, however, knew it was naught but the rush of adrenaline pulsing through his veins, the heady thrill of battle-lust which always gave that bit of strength needed for one last push, one last shove, one last swing of a steadily faltering arm before the weight of the weapon and the sting of the fatal wounds finally caught up to the mind, and the body crumpled with sheer exhaustion. It was a precious thing, that battle-lust, for it saved lives more often than not; and if nothing else, it gave time for the warriors to meet their end with hearts as calm and unwavering as the stone they came from, and the stone to which they would return.

“Bilbo?”

Behind him, Thorin felt Bilbo tense at the very familiar voice. He could have recognized it in his sleep, with his eyes blinded and his ears bleeding. He could have recalled every rasp and harsh edge to the syllables, every roll over the vowels and the lingering pauses before punctuation, with his own tongue severed and his throat scratched. He _knew_ that voice; yes, he knew it.

“Bilbo, is that you?”

Bilbo suddenly sagged like a marionette with all its strings cut, and he almost dropped on top of Thorin, his chest heaving with unbridled relief. “Dwalin,” he called, and his voice broke into a strangled sob. Thorin squeezed his hand tighter, hoping to lend some comfort, but Bilbo seemed to choke on his own tongue at the action as he began to outright babble then. “Oh, _Dwalin_ , thank Yavanna. Help me, _please_ , help me, it’s—”

“Hold on, Bilbo, stay right there,” Dwalin shouted from somewhere off in the distance, but the worry in his voice belied the sternness of his command, the roles of a friend and a war general clamouring for precedence in his tone. The swift slide of metal drifted with the deliberate steps of his arrival—he must be putting away one of his axes. “Stay _right there_ , you hear me? I’m coming to you. I’ll get you.”

The heavy thundering of the steel-tipped Dwarven boots accompanied his words, the dull thump as he descended the stairs in a frantic desperation. Thorin couldn’t see over Bilbo’s shoulder as he lay curled protectively over him, his head pillowed in his beloved’s lap as the Hobbit held him close. There were worse ways to die, he mused; and really, in all honesty, he was quite comfortable here. His dearest friend and his One were with him, and Dwalin would only have returned after making sure his nephews were safe, so it was a win-win situation however he chose to look at it.

Behind them, Dwalin’s footsteps suddenly stopped.

“Dwalin,” Bilbo cried in despair, and the anguish on his face was clear as diamonds, wrenching a dagger into the fault lines appearing along his heart. “Dwalin. _Dwalin_.”

“Is that—” Dwalin began, his voice wavering and timorous, but halted. “Is that—did you—”

“ _Yes_ ,” Bilbo answered, and he hastily swallowed a rising sob. His fingers fluttered madly around the wound in Thorin’s chest, skittering nervously like a wild animal that finally tasted of freedom and never realized it came with the price of facing the brutality of the world next. “Yes, yes, it is him. Dwalin, help me.”

“That’s—”

“Dwalin, _please_ ,” Bilbo called, sounding so utterly wrecked that Thorin had to resist the urge to curl a hand around the back of his neck and pull him down to press their brows together. “I’m— I’m scared, _please_.”

“But, he’s dead, you don’t have to be.” Dwalin answered, his voice still shaking a little with the sounds of boots scuffing over stone. “He is dead, the Defiler is dead.” The radiance emanating from the wonder and amazement in his voice could have blinded even the most luminescent of Elves, and there came a dull thump, as if the axe had slipped from Dwalin’s experienced grasp and to the ground. “Azog’s _dead_ , the bastard is dead!” A burst of laughter exploded from his mouth once, quick and hysterical, almost dazed, as if the sound had slipped from him without any control over his tongue. “And if my eyes ain’t losing their light, I’d wager my beard that’s Sting sticking out his throat.”

“Your eyes clearly fail you now,” Bilbo finally snapped, and Thorin hid a wince at the annoyance in his voice. “Perhaps I should stick Sting in _your_ face, not that it would make much of a difference anyway.”

Dwalin made a confused little noise in the back of his throat, as if he was about to ask Bilbo what the hell he was on about, but it seemed he finally noticed the figure slumped over and half-hidden by the Hobbit’s protective stance. The silence that reigned then was absolute, so quiet he could hear the wind’s caress over their flushed and bruised skins.

“Wait,” Dwalin managed to speak after a few loaded moments, his voice so hoarse with surprise that Thorin would have laughed if he wasn’t about to die in a minute or two. “Wait, are those—are those _Thorin’s_ legs?”

As it was, Thorin did make a rather pathetic sound as he tried to laugh. It sounded like he had been gargling with the sludge from the gutters outside the mines in Ered Luin, all squelching and wet and so disgustingly filthy, and he shut up almost as soon as he began.

“I’ve got the rest of him attached too, if only you’d stop goggling at Azog and bloody _help me_ ,” Bilbo snarled.

Dwalin let out a sound like someone had punched him in the throat, and a second later, his friend’s hulking figure swiftly kneeled down next to him. His face was pinched with worry and exhaustion, and a slow trickle of blood had dried halfway down his bald tattooed pate, and he was shifting his left arm rather stiffly. Despite his haggard and grizzled appearance, Dwalin still looked every bit the rugged war general he was, the Dwarf who held himself with such pride that his wounds seemed inconsequential next to the massive ego he toted around with him all the damn time.

Dwalin’s eyes alighted on the splintered breastplate, at the massive wound that spanned the whole width of Thorin’s chest. His eyes shut briefly for a moment, and his head dipped into a reverent bow. “My King,” he murmured, his voice gentler than Thorin had heard in decades, and his chin worked rather furiously as he seemed to chew upon his next words, looking distant and detached as he did. “I—”

“You look like shit,” Thorin said through gritted teeth, enjoying the little start of surprise his dearest friend gave at his voice. “If I had anything left in my stomach, I would have hurled it right at you.”

Dwalin stared at him for a moment in sheer disbelief, his jaw loose, as if he was surprised that Thorin would think of wasting the last reserves of his energy on making witty quips, then shook his head firmly like he thought better of it. “You aren’t dead,” he stated firmly, his mouth still a little slack.

“I am dreadfully sorry to disappoint you, old friend.”

“He isn’t dead, and let’s keep it that way, Dwalin, yes?” Bilbo piped in then, practically buzzing with tension. He reached out and patted the bald warrior on the forearm quickly and decisively, and drew back his hand to clutch at Thorin’s shoulders in reassurance. “We need to get him down to the healing tents.”

“Dwalin,” Thorin suddenly rasped, the thought striking him faster than Thranduil’s Captain drawing an arrow in her bow (he absolutely didn’t want to make the comparison in any way, but lying on the brink of death put a few things in unconscious perspective, namely his ability to give credit where it was due). “Dwalin, the boys,” he said with increasing desperation, grasping at his friend’s vambraces with frantic movements, “ _my boys_ , are they—are they—”

“They’re fine, Thorin,” Dwalin answered calmly, folding his huge gloved hand over Thorin’s scrabbling fingers. He squeezed his hand once, brief and firm, yet a complete tirade in itself. “They’re with Dàin and his men, he won’t let anything happen to them. I swear it to you.”

“Dàin, yes,” Thorin heard himself saying in a mindless mumble, but his voice sounded tinny and far-off, like he was a detached spectator looking in on his own body from somewhere on the outside, hovering in the empty space between here and there, wherever those were. “Dàin will keep them safe, yes.” He blinked, and focused on his friend again, squinting at him a little. “He will, won’t he?”

Dwalin, for his part, glossed over the slight tremor in his King’s voice. “They’re fighters, Thorin, they will be fine.” A pointed cough came from behind him, and Dwalin glanced up briefly at the Hobbit. He nodded again, in a motion that brooked no argument, and his tone was far gentler than before. “But yes, they will be safe with Dàin. I promise you.”

“Good, that’s—” Thorin said. “That’s good.”

“It’s wonderful,” Bilbo said softly, and stooped to kiss Thorin’s pasty brow again. He slipped one of his hands from his shoulders and smoothed it over his sallow cheeks, a little crease making its way onto his dirt-streaked forehead. “And now, it’s time to get _you_ down for help. You’re losing colour.”

“You can’t die,” Dwalin burst out suddenly, his hands clenching into fists where they rested near Thorin’s forearm. “You can’t, Thorin. Not now, not when we’ve finally got back Erebor. You’re the King, you’re—” He swallowed noisily, throat bobbing as he readied himself to continue. “You’re _our_ King, you can’t just bugger off now that the quest is complete! See it through, you bloody idiot!”

“Dwalin, my friend, I can assure you I did not want to choose this fate for myself,” Thorin spoke around a cough, trying to ignore the taste of blood that drenched the inside of his mouth. “But things aren’t exactly going according to plan, you see?” He let out a gusty sigh, settling back further in the comforting warmth of Bilbo’s lap with a pleased hum, and a small voice in the back of his mind told him that if this was his end, he was willing to accept it with gladness, for he had rarely a chance to experience such satisfaction in the last century of his life. Knowing his nephews were safe, that his sister would not lose the joy of life again, surrounded by his dearest friend and his beloved—this was a grace he would be foolish to not realize. Perhaps the Valar had taken mercy on him after all.

“There was… so much that I wanted to do and see done before my time came. But that’s not how things work. If this is the end the gods have designed for me, so be it. I will not complain, and I accept my lot with joy.” He curled his blood-stained glove around his friend’s wrist. “I know now that I leave my family and my kingdom in more capable hands than my own; how can I find fault with that?”

Dwalin began to blink furiously, his lip wobbling. “Thorin, don’t. Don’t go, brother. This cannot be over, not yet.”

“My friend, I know I—”

“Oh, _shut it_ , will you?” Bilbo raged from behind him all of a sudden, the ferocity of his words cracking like a whip across the stretched silence. “Seriously, Thorin, just shut up. Stop talking like you’re on your deathbed and you’re listing your regrets and your hopes and your broken dreams to the poor fellows who managed to find you long enough to hold your hands while you breathe your last. ”

“But I just—”

“You said there were things you wanted to see and do before you died?” Bilbo demanded harshly, but the smallest quaver still made its way into his tone. “Well, see them done! Stop moping and stop talking like you’re about to die, because that is _not_ happening.”

“Bilbo,” Dwalin whispered brokenly into the reigning stillness, and a fierce bellow of wind tugged at the singed ends of his beard, ruffling the fraying strands with an uncharacteristic sway. “Will you not let him speak?”

“No, I will not,” Bilbo said, so small and fragile-sounding, but the resolution in his statement was stronger than iron. “I will not hear him speak as if these are his last words. He has much to live for, and I will not watch him throw it away for the whim of madness of a monster. I will _not_.”

“Bilbo,” Thorin said. “I’m dying.”

“You’re grievously wounded, there’s a bloody difference,” the Hobbit sneered down at him, but his eyes immediately flickered to the laceration again, terror darting through those magical eyes. “Don’t be dramatic,” he chided, tone still a little jagged at the edges. His head shot up to look at the war general of Erebor then, his fury melting away into worry. “Carrying him down is out of the question, you’re too wounded to not end up breaking a few bones yourself. Do you think we can call for aid, somehow?”

“I can run down to Dàin, get back here on the rams with an escort so you two can come down safely,” Dwalin suggested, then he shook his head rapidly at Bilbo’s expression, holding up a hand firmly. “No, burglar, you stay here with him. We don’t want you ending up with a cracked skull on the way.”

“They won’t see me,” Bilbo insisted. “I’d rather you stayed here with Thorin, in case one of those evil things decides to show up again.”

Dwalin shook his head, reaching out to take Thorin’s wrist again in an absentminded gesture. “I scoured the place, it’s empty. The Gundabad Orcs ran to join the battle below, and last I saw, Thranduil’s spawn had Bolg surrounded. There’s no way he’s getting out of there alive, not with those prissy things after him.”

“Children, Dwalin. They’re called _children_ ,” Bilbo muttered, steadfastly ignoring Thorin’s quiet little snigger from his lap. He reached up and started unbuttoning his coat with those nimble fingers, his face hardened in grit and determination, and cocked an eyebrow at Thorin’s dazed expression. “What are _you_ staring at?”

“Did I ever tell you how skilled you are with your hands?” Thorin asked him, and Dwalin made a disgusted noise at his side.

Bilbo nodded, shrugging the worn old blue fabric over his shoulders with deft movements, not once breaking his stride as he replied. “Yes, I think you’ve mentioned it a fair number of times, thank you. Although, I do believe it was under the influence of a lot of ale.”

“And _that_ is my cue to leave,” Dwalin cut in hurriedly, shooting Bilbo a truly exasperated look of complete and utter fond annoyance. He patted Thorin’s hand again, looking for all the world like he was going to start another deeply moving speech. His shoulders drew as he inhaled deeply, his left arm still held a little stiffly as he prepared to spill the tangled mess of emotion within him. “Thorin, I want you to know that I am glad to have—”

A sudden shadow fell across his friend’s face, massive and dark and blotting out the sun. Bilbo didn’t even glance upwards, still focused on ripping his coat lengthwise into huge bandages with a little knife he produced out of nowhere (and wasn’t that a truly discomfiting notion, he realized, with equal parts worry and pride). Thorin squinted up into the skies, at that desolate cloud-cover of grey that split in places to allow a few cautious beams of sunlight to permeate the freezing world below. It was there that he noticed it, the massive span of wings against the weak sun, and Dwalin suddenly let out a truly pitiful sound from deep in his throat.

“Eagles,” Thorin said, and let out a resigned sigh. “The _fucking_ eagles, they’re at it again.”

“What?” Bilbo demanded roughly, still not looking up as he bundled the bulk of his coat and readied to press it to the wound which still bled sluggishly—a major annoyance, if you asked Thorin; dying of blood loss really wasn’t the way to go. “Dwalin, here, I want you to press this to the wound and I’ll bind it tight, alright?”

“Eagles,” Dwalin choked out, as the skies finally opened with a will of their own to let out form upon form of the enormous winged terrors. “Bilbo,” he gritted out through a clenched jaw, the wonder writ in bold letters across his face. “Bilbo, look up.” He reached out blindly with a hand to grip the Hobbit’s shoulder, barely missing his bleeding ears, and shook it roughly. “ _Look_!”

Bilbo glanced upwards, and his mouth fell open in the clearest expression Thorin had seen since he’d had the unfortunate stroke of luck to end up almost gutted by an old enemy atop a decrepit structure that barely anyone knew he was still in. Their burglar’s eyes shone suspiciously, and his exhale was so ragged it almost put his threadbare shirt to shame—not that Thorin was complaining in any way, oh heavens no; those collarbones were a work of art and he would very much enjoy dying if he could gaze at that particular sculpture one last time.

“Okay, that’s brilliant,” Bilbo said, almost drooping in relief. His shoulders shook slightly, but his hands were firm when they squeezed Thorin’s shoulders in reassurance again. “It’s about time they showed up. I’ll handle his wound; you go and get one of them here.”

Dwalin blinked at that as if drawn from a sudden reverie. Judging from the sullen twist to his mouth, he was, in all probability, remembering the last time the eagles had arrived for them and the disturbing parallels that anyone with half a mind could draw between the two instances—both of them had Thorin almost ending up dead, of course. He just hoped he’d survive long enough this time to properly apologise to the sons of Fundin for making their hair fall out, or turn prematurely white.

“What?” Dwalin asked, and looked up at the eagles, who were letting out loud screeches as they began to circle low and lower still, their beady eyes fixed upon the battlefield. “ _How_?”

“‘How’?” Bilbo stared at him and tilted his head, pointedly looking the war general up and down with an inquisitive twist to his mouth. “You’ve got great big arms, don’t you; go put them to use! Go to the edge and shout, they’ll hear you and come down.”

“You want me to _wave_ , at a bunch of birds.” Dwalin said.

“I’d rather you played the fiddle and danced with your shirt off, Dwalin, but we all have to make do,” Bilbo answered him airily, and swatted gently at Thorin when he burst into broken chuckles with the taste of blood still darting unpleasantly in his mouth. “Keep quiet, you. Dwalin, seriously, go and get them before they pass by and don’t notice us.”

Dwalin gave the two of them a piercing glare, but Bilbo merely lifted a hand loosely and shooed him away like he was ushering off a rather persistent goat. If Dwalin had stayed any longer, Thorin believed their burglar would toss a pebble at him. Dwalin, however, rose to his feet stiffly and lumbered off, looking towards the sky with a nervous swallow.

Bilbo waited a few moments, before he let out a fond little noise. “You enjoyed watching that, didn’t you.”

“More so because I know you did it on purpose,” Thorin chuckled wetly, feeling a faint squelch inside his chest at the action. He licked his lips, running his tongue over the torn flesh and trying to hide his grimace. “You fluster him too easily.”

“It’s not my fault you’re all just a bunch of prudes,” Bilbo snorted, as he leaned forward a little to hover his coat a scant inch above the gaping wound. “Hold still, your bleeding’s slowed down but this is still going to hurt.”

“What else do you think I’ve been doing since— _oh, Mahal_ ,” Thorin hissed through his teeth, reaching out blindly to grip Bilbo’s knee as the Hobbit pressed down on the wound so hard he almost saw stars. “Easy, easy there,” he gasped out, head still reeling with the sheer agony of the injury, his beloved’s touch anchoring him to the world like a no other. “You don’t want to accidentally cave in my chest.”

“Oh, pipe down, you huffy little thing,” Bilbo said with a smile in his voice, although his eyes darted momentarily to Thorin’s face just to make sure he wasn’t actually passing out on top of him. He shifted one hand quickly to the side, reaching for the long strips of his coat and beginning to wriggle one of them under his torso. “Lift up for me for a moment, dear.”

Thorin sucked in a deep breath, hoisting his upper body for a brief moment before he collapsed in Bilbo’s lap again. “Funny,” he coughed, sweating like one of Dàin’s stupid pigs, “I remember saying something like that to you back in Laketown.”

Bilbo glanced once over his shoulder to where Dwalin had disappeared, a wry smile absently tugging at the corners of his mouth. “You just relayed my own words back to me,” he murmured, knotting the first of the bandages in place with his deft fingers. He grinned then, an achingly familiar expression on his face. “ _Verbatim_ ,” he enunciated.

Thorin grunted, feeling a dizzying sort of darkness coming up to wrap around him with a horrifying and truly disturbing sense of familiarity. “Um,” he began, his tongue suddenly weighing down like stone in his drying mouth. “Bilbo?”

The Hobbit’s eyes instantly snapped to his own, concern painted starkly over his creased face. He looked pinched and worn, like the strain of the last few days had weighed down far too heavily on him, chipping away his resolve bit by bit until naught remained but a lingering sense of dread and resignation inside a figure as frail as glass. “What? What is it?” He asked sharply, tying off another bandage. “Thorin, are you alright?”

Thorin blinked; he hadn’t even noticed when Bilbo had slipped the second bandage under his unresponsive self. “I feel strangely tired.”

“That’s alright, darling, it’s alright to feel tired,” Bilbo promised him, speaking quickly, his hands still moving over him without a pause. Thorin realized he should have been a little alarmed that he couldn’t feel his touch over his arms and chest anymore, but all he felt was a bone-deep weariness, like a heavy load pressing down on his consciousness until he fought to keep his eyes open. Bilbo smoothed a hand over his brow, his fingers shaking. “It’s completely alright, but don’t fall asleep, okay?”

“Your eyes,” Thorin suddenly said, the comprehension dawning upon him with a slow, syrupy sort of horror. He struggled to sit up, his hands scrabbling on the ice for a hold, but Bilbo gently took them away and intertwined their fingers. “ _Your eyes_ , Bilbo, I can’t—I can’t see what colour they are. I can’t tell what they look like!”

A flash of pain raced across his burglar’s face, so sudden that it seemed to have shocked him too. “That’s okay, Thorin,” he reassured him softly, forcing an uncomfortable smile at his mouth. “You always told me my eyes have too many colours to properly note, anyway.”

“But I could see them,” Thorin said quietly, and his voice broke on the last word. “I could tell all of them apart. I always could.”

“You can tell me when you get better, how does that sound?” Bilbo asked him, and his hands alighted upon the tattered remains of his coat bound firmly over the wound. He raised a brow as if telling him to brace himself and pushed down hard, but Thorin barely felt a thing. “Thorin, darling, keep your eyes open, won’t you?”

“I never apologized to you, did I?” Thorin said, looking up at the eagles still pouring out of the clouds like some sort of unnatural rain. _Droplets that could fly, droplets with talons_ , he thought to himself, and sniggered. A distant part of his brain grimaced in displeasure at the despicable humour, if it could even be called that.

Bilbo looked absolutely gutted, his open expression so wretched it would have killed him (had he not already been dying, Thorin thought, and snickered to himself again) and he shifted in his position to curl around Thorin’s side instead. “Thorin,” he said with a quaver in his words, “don’t close your eyes, okay? There’s going to be plenty of time for you to sleep later.”

“You know that I love you, don’t you?” Thorin asked him, and with a start, he realized his words were beginning to slur together. The ache was fading, but the chill that was seeping in to take its place was a different matter altogether. Bilbo must know, he _had_ to know, he couldn’t just leave without reminding him again. “I have valued you from the start, my ghivashel, even if I wasn’t the most eloquent of people to be around. Forgive me for not realizing sooner, that your worth has always been far greater than any treasure hoard of any kingdom, royal lineage be damned.”

“Dwalin,” Bilbo suddenly screamed, his hand tightening around Thorin. A crazed light danced in his eyes, the pupils wide with abject terror. “ _Dwalin_!”

“Dìs and Dàin will raise the boys, and they’ll do a far better job now that I’ll be out of their hair,” he hummed quietly, rubbing a thumb absent-mindedly at the stretch of skin between Bilbo’s thumb and forefinger. “They’ll do a bloody fantastic job of it too, all four of them, at Erebor. You’ll see.” He lifted his gaze to Bilbo’s pale face, and squinted curiously. “You will, won’t you? You’ll stay to see the mountain come alive again?”

Bilbo was still shouting. “Dwalin, _please_!” He cried, his fingers digging into his hand so furiously that Thorin wouldn’t have been surprised to see a chunk of flesh ripped away. “ _Dwalin_ , help me, please!”

“ _Here_!” He heard Dwalin bellow suddenly, like his friend had forced himself to shout with every last bit of strength he had in him. “He’s injured, we need help! Over here, you _blind_ assholes!”

Thorin snorted. “They’re going to drop him on his bald head, wait and watch.”

“Thorin, look at me,” Bilbo insisted, placing a hand firmly around his jaw. He cupped the side of his face with such tenderness that Thorin’s eyes fluttered, a faint smile flickering over his cracked lips. “Look at me, stay with me! You must stay awake, yes? Open your eyes, love, please.”

“I _am_ awake,” Thorin answered, hacking roughly again. A dribble of blood made its way out his mouth again, and Bilbo stared in quiet fear at the steady stream of red that was making its way into his beard. He must have made such an unattractive sight, Thorin thought with no small amount of despair, but it wasn’t as if he could dart off to dress himself in his finest clothes now, at any rate. “I feel faint, even though the pain is fading away now.” He coughed again, and blood sprayed all over his makeshift bandages. “Aw, shit.”

“Thorin, don’t you dare,” Bilbo choked out, looking so pained and heartbroken that something wrenched itself furiously into Thorin’s bruised and bleeding heart. If he shut his eyes, he could almost feel the bubbling of blood into the cavity of his chest, the slow churn that would slowly turn into a gushing flow. “Thorin, _no_ , don’t you dare! No, keep your eyes open; keep your eyes here, on me! Thorin, _please_ ,” he gritted out, shattered and timorous, “please, please don’t close your eyes.”

“They’re coming!” Dwalin’s voice drifted over, caught in the sweeping drafts of wind that were buffeting against Bilbo’s hunched figure at his side. “They’re nearly here, hold on! I’m coming back to you, Bilbo, wait!”

“Thorin, _please_ ,” Bilbo whispered, so soft that his voice was barely more than a soundless exhale. “Please, for me. _Please_.”

“I am sorry I could not prove it to you, that I failed in showing you I would have given you the world, had you only asked for it,” Thorin said, feeling oddly at peace where he lay. The sounds of the eagles screeching had moved further ahead, but the roar of battle was barely discernible at the height of Ravenhill. All he could listen to was the shuddering rasp of Bilbo’s breathing, the erratic rumble of his heartbeat, and the distant sound of Dwalin making his way back to them, his armour and weapons thundering in his wake. “You made me so happy, Bilbo, so much happier than I believed I had any right to be. Forgive me; I could not do the same for you.”

“ _No_ ,” Bilbo breathed, pressing his forehead to Thorin’s brow, his exhale blessedly warm and stuttered against his freezing skin. “No, Thorin, you have _nothing_ to apologise for. Nothing at all, alright?” He pressed a kiss to the King’s fluttering eyelids, his fingers digging into his beard. “Keep your eyes on me. Don’t look away, please. Please, my love, stay with me.”

“I failed at everything I did; did I ever tell you that?” Thorin mused, staring calmly at the expanse of slate-grey over their heads. The clouds rolled in swift, sinuous motions as they tumbled in a flurry over the valley, their shadows starting to bleach everything to a pale bone-ash. “I could not be a good son or a good brother, for I watched my family and my people wither away and die. I could not be a good leader or a good King, for I led you all into such peril at every step of our journey. I failed at all that I was supposed to be, and I had the gall to feel betrayed when I faced your actions.” He laughed once, short and bitter, the residual ache of that earth-splitting moment on the battlements of the mountain coming back to strike him swifter than Azog’s blade. “I do not deserve your kindness, Bilbo. I don’t believe I ever have.”

“What did I tell you about talking like you are dictating your last words?” Bilbo demanded, low and enraged, but a spot of crimson bloomed against his cracked lower lip when he bit down on it, hard. He looked back over his shoulder, his neck craning towards the heavens. “Look, the eagles are coming, Thorin. They’re nearly here. _Look_!”

“Thorin!” Dwalin cried out in anguish, and with a loud clatter, he fell to his knees at his King’s feet. He stretched out a hand slowly with the utmost care and caution, and laid it over his knee. “Brother, _come on_ ,” he whispered in a voice so soft and cracked that it would have burst into pieces had a stronger wind blown about, “you’re stronger than this. Just a minute longer, they’re almost here.”

“Look at me,” Bilbo begged, the note of pleading threaded through his words. He turned his face in his direction, those ethereal eyes burning into him with the intensity of a thousand suns. “Thorin, look at me.”

“I am sorry,” Thorin whispered, hushed, as if telling the two of them a grave secret. His chest thrummed and trembled with the din of a hundred war drums, all keeping pace with the same furious staccato in his entire being. “I truly am. I wish I had never hurt you the way I did. Please keep them safe, keep my boys and my sister safe. And if you ever find it in your hearts to forgive me—” Here, Bilbo made a distressed sound and Dwalin’s hand tightened on his knee, “know that I will rest easy in the Halls of my Maker.”

His eyes slid shut then, even as he heard Bilbo choke out a pained “No, no, _no_ , Thorin, don’t you _dare_ , no,” and Dwalin cried out wordlessly in a single strained note. It was not his intention, of course, not when his beloved grabbed at his arm with his bloodstained fingers and cried out harshly into the silence; not when he felt the brow of his dearest and oldest friend drop down to rest at the thick leather of his boots over his ankle. Some things, however, were far beyond the control of living creatures such as they, and all the tears and blood and laments of the world could not bring back one who had set out on the path to a world they did not know—another world, beyond their own, lesser one. It was a lesson that all were to experience one day; and for all its cruelty and agony and everlasting wounds that could not be seen by the eye and lingered long after the blood had been scrubbed clean and the dead laid to rest, it was the most important lesson of all.

So, when a hand that he had previously associated with warmth and pleasant gentleness and an unblemished smoothness not even found in the richest of silks came cracking down onto his cheek with an embarrassingly loud noise, needless to say, it was a rather rude awakening, in all possible meanings of the word.

“ _Hey_!” Bilbo suddenly snarled, his face inches from his own, the sheer fury in his expression unmindful of the tears tracking cutting gouges into his dirt-stained cheeks. Thorin winced in equal parts disoriented surprise and stunned pain as Bilbo’s hand twisted furiously into his hair and _yanked_ in one smooth motion, his eyes watering as his follicles positively screamed in agony. Bilbo leaned closer still, the movement focusing the ache in his head to one singular point with such ferocity that Thorin let out a pained cry, his chin tipped back and his mouth stretching open. A vehement grimace was painted on his usually harmless face.

“Hey, _eyes on me_ , motherfucker,” he sneered, the eyes in question dancing between ochre and green and a pale gold more precious than all the treasure in Erebor. “You’re not dying on me, you hear that?” Bilbo spat, the rage so profound that Thorin would have gone down on his knees had he not already been lying on the ground like someone who just got trampled by a horde of bulls. “You’re going to keep your eyes open, and we’re going to get you down so the healers can take a look at you and stitch you up good and proper. Do you understand?”

Off to the side, Dwalin let out a wheeze.

“Thorin,” Bilbo said softly, _dangerously_ , and the hand curled into his hair gripped tight and tighter still, until he felt as if the skin of his forehead would start peeling off at any given moment. His lips brushed over Thorin’s panting mouth once, a faraway caress. His gaze glittered with unbridled anger. “Do you _understand_?”

“Yes,” Thorin gasped like the complete, pig-headed idiot that he was. “Yes, I understand.”

“There’s a good boy,” Bilbo whispered, the inferno in his eyes softening long enough for him to press his lips to Thorin’s bruised cheek. He straightened up then to look at something behind him, the relief shining in his swiftly brightening expression, and turned to Dwalin with an apologetic grimace. “And if you could just help me get him safely with one of the eagles, Dwalin, I would be thankful.”

Dwalin blinked once, twice. He shook his head firmly.

“Yes, of course,” he said, still blinking furiously as he rose gracefully to his feet. He glanced somewhere off behind Thorin, the nervousness making a splendid reappearance. “That didn’t look safe to me the first time around, and it hasn’t made any difference now when I know he’s horribly wounded. I’ll help you strap him down.”

Thorin snickered so loudly that some of the blood still pooling in his mouth shot straight up his nose, and he leaned to the side inelegantly, snorting and coughing as Bilbo rubbed a hand soothingly up and down his back.

“Dwalin, I’m sure Thorin is absolutely flattered,” Bilbo said from above him, as he hacked and spat his bloody lungs out. The smile was in his tone. “But yes, I don’t think I could do it on my own, so please.”

Dwalin’s wordless mutterings reached his ears, and Thorin let himself relax as the familiar presence of his friend and his beloved converged on him. It felt strangely safe, like a cocoon of warmth and joy, one he had rarely had a chance to enjoy before, so when his eyes slipped shut this time, it was fuelled more by an unfamiliar ease rather than a distant call from somewhere far away. Dwalin’s hands curled under his shoulders, the gloves digging into the broken ends of his breastplate, and Bilbo grabbed his ankles, the two of them falling into a practiced rhythm as they lugged him along like a bothersome bit of baggage. He barely registered a voice at his side, quietly saying, “Lift for me, sweetheart, just for a moment, and _there_ you go” before the rough scrape of talons curled around him in a familiar envelope of hardened scales and itchy feathers, a faint and half-formed memory tugging at the edges of his consciousness. A stupid thing to get used to, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

“I told you, Thorin, those _were_ my words,” Bilbo murmured into his ear, swiftly kissing his cheek. “I’ll see you when the battle is won. Try not to die until I return.”

His hand cupped his face briefly, wordlessly, a myriad of emotions passing between them like the viciously relentless deluge of a maelstrom. Thorin lifted his hand by summoning the last reserves of his energy to fold his own fingers over his burglar’s. He squeezed their conjoined hands once, trying to communicate so much in so little as he clung to his anchor, his grounding force, his lighthouse in a raging sea, trying to say _don’t leave me, don’t leave, I don’t know where to go if not with you, please, let me stay wherever you are, please, don’t leave me, I don’t know if I can do this without you._

And then, Bilbo stepped back, and let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi, it's me again! thank you for reading so far! i love you!  
> please drop comments and kudos below, they truly are my bread and butter :")  
> let's hope this doesn't flop, eh?  
> come talk to me on [my twitter!](https://twitter.com/yehkyakardiya?s=09)  
> drop by [my tumblr](https://yehkyakardiya.tumblr.com/) as well! (i'm new here so i don't know shit, okay)


	2. itchy cloaks and delicate noses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Thorin is going to stab the shit out of you when he wakes up,” Dwalin told him sagely.
> 
> “No, I’ll protect him.” Bilbo said, and turned back to Dàin. “You look different without your pig horns.”

Bilbo was no stranger to embarrassment. No, really, he wasn’t. Most people would not be able to discern anything wrong with him, could not be able to tell what he was thinking or planning or pondering over in his strangely clever mind, could not be able to recognize who he was cussing out silently using words his father would wash out his mouth with soap for; and for that slight, they called him _curious_. The flighty little moniker had stuck with him ever since he came of age, because anyone who would have dared to call him otherwise would have had to face the collective wrath of his parents, who were, in all honesty, not a force to be easily reckoned with.

The name had bumbled and warped and stuck with uncanny precision to the heir of Bag End over his years in the Shire, like a rather persistent bit of mud trod into the doormat that didn’t come off no matter how hard you tried, and believe him, Bilbo really did try. If the analogy was to be examined in the light of his then-current circumstances, one could say that he had scrubbed at that bit of mud with an old toothbrush on his knees until he’d worn out all the bristles, and at the most, the bulk of it had washed away, but the dented toothbrush had had to accept its sad defeat at that annoying smudge of green and brown that had found a new home amidst the carefully woven strands of jute. And that was how curious little Bilbo Baggins came to be, the only son of meek ol’ Bungo Baggins and the audacious Belladonna Took, the poor young fellow who had no idea whatsoever about what was to happen next.

His father, they spoke of with sad little shakes of their heads, leaning close together at the Wednesday markets over their wares of substandard vegetables and frayed blankets, and muttered about what a shame it was, really, that the handsome young Baggins lad had been swept away by that bold Took lass, who was notoriously prone to running around with wizards and going to visit places far beyond the borders of their little Shire. Rumour had it that she had once been to some shoddy place called Rivendell, where she’d met _Elves_ , of all people. It was truly a disgrace, for the polite darling Bungo had been endowed with a lot when his parents had passed away, and for him to spend it all building a house for his irascible wife, when everyone knew she wouldn’t manage to stay in one place long enough to even know which silverware went where? Tch tch tch, everyone and their grandmother could agree that it was a truly horrible idea.

The fact that his mother had settled down, that she had actually stayed and not gone chasing off into the sunset like a heroine from those thrice-damned books she was always reading, was still a topic often brought up in the Shire. The whispers had settled down once Bilbo had lost both his parents in quick succession, the Shire-folk trying to rein in their tongues long enough to pass the test of paying respect to the newly buried, and then it was always gnarled hands settling on his shoulders, forgettable faces telling him he was lucky to be a Baggins, that Belladonna had realized the comforts of a domestic existence at the right time, and that she would be so proud to have you as a child, my darling boy. Bilbo had barely refrained from telling them that he knew his parents had been proud of him, and that if they didn’t mind, he would very much like to go back to being the curious outcast of their green land and never have to interact with them and their frilly funeral clothing ever again.

But that is the nature of a brand, is it not? When the blood is washed away and the dirty bandages are tossed out of the window unceremoniously to traumatize passers-by like a bloodied ferret in the dark, when the flesh cools down long enough to see the ruined patch of skin left in place like a proud relic of battle—that is when you realize that the mark won’t ever go away. No amount of weeping or feverish scratching at your flesh until it runs red will ever wash it off. The comprehension dawns on you then, like the faint echo of the sun after the last dredges of winter have relinquished their hold over the steel-grey sky, and you sit back in your armchair and think, _oh_. Oh, this is how it is going to be, this is going to stay with me for the rest of my life, and there is nothing I can do about it.

It grows on you, Bilbo knew that now, whatever brand was pressed into your skin when you were pinned down with the weight of a hundred waggling tongues and a hundred pairs of beady eyes settled upon your back. Something had snapped inside of him that day, something wicked and annoyed and so bloody exhausted with having to force himself to not be whoever he wanted to become. And so, he had stepped up to the title of the local eccentric bachelor with all the grace of a king embracing his mantle, happy to be known as the queer fellow who had once been caught in a scandalous position in the Proudfoots’ barn with another doe-eyed young lad from Tuckborough (although, if you ask Bilbo, it was all rather innocent, and they’d only managed to shuck their shirts off before they had been rudely interrupted). Everyone spoke of him as the quirky and reclusive resident who lived in the last house on Bagshot Row, who funnily enough had no qualms in shedding his reservations when it came to charming the pants off unsuspecting young men who managed to spend even a little time around him. Bilbo found his description rip-roaringly hilarious; he thought it made him sound particularly dashing, and he wore his brand like a hard-won scar, for if you looked at it one way, it truly was the sign of a wound that had not quite healed all the way, and still ached something stiff when you woke up on chilly autumn mornings without a comfortable fire blazing away merrily in the earth.

And so, Bilbo Baggins—devilishly infamous bachelor of the Shire and professional recluse—had found himself in a bit of a tight spot when a bunch of Dwarves had come pouring into his house and making themselves more at home than he himself ever had. He had been mere seconds away from busting out his set of carving knives and going to town on the intruders when they started tossing his treasured pottery around, because hey, they had already dirtied his house beyond repair, what more damage could a few bloodstains on the carpet do? But then, because the universe loves him and has been known time and time again to want nothing but the best for him, Gandalf had gone on ahead and opened the door to the most ridiculously conceited and arrogant bastard Bilbo had ever had the displeasure of meeting. Thorin Oakenshield’s condescending smirk as he’d entered the smial had grated on his nerves like a block of his beloved parmesan rubbing him up the wrong way, but then the Dwarven King had looked him up and down, circling him with an appraising smile, and Bilbo hadn’t quite been able to hide his proud grin. Apparently, he hadn’t lost his charm just yet—in fact, it was all the more potent, because apparently, the heir of Durin had been deposed _royalty_ , of all things—and if Gandalf’s dodgy little giggle was anything to go by, he’d had a supporter of that specific notion already.

Bilbo didn’t feel very charming at the moment, tossed over his friend’s shoulder like a trussed-up cow. Each of the steps along the way jostled him something terrible, and he barely managed to grit his teeth to stop the annoyed snarl that threatened to bust out past his lips every time Dwalin’s armour dug into the already sore flesh of his stomach. From his upside-down view, he could see more of the war general than he had ever imagined he would, and he blamed a part of the uneasy feeling in his stomach to that. Dwalin, to his credit, barely made any sound to express his displeasure at having the Hobbit closer than comfort to his face other than the occasional grumbling every time Bilbo started slipping off his shoulder, but that was all he said.

“Dwalin,” Bilbo said, trying to grab a hold of the sides of the Dwarf’s chestplate and lever himself upright. His hands gripped tight at the leather bands straining across his ribcage and scrabbled to secure a hold. “You can put me down, you know. I can walk.”

Under him (and Yavanna, wasn’t _that_ a truly horrifying thought), Dwalin snorted. “Yeah, I don’t think so. And don’t grip to the straps too hard, I think I hurt my ribs before.”

Bilbo made a thoroughly unimpressed noise deep in his throat. “And you’re telling me that _now_ , while I’m thrown over your shoulder like a blanket? You never thought an injury was worth mentioning to me?”

“Don’t be silly,” Dwalin told him. “You’re more like an itchy cloak.”

A small part of Bilbo was actually really glad Dwalin was there with him. He wasn’t very certain about his thoughts on the part where he was being carried along, but again, everyone had a way of showing affection differently. Bilbo, for his part, had inherited the fierce temper of his mother instead of the sweet admonishments of his father, and really, how dare someone he loved and cared about go ahead and get themselves injured? The sheer audacity of the idea made him shake his head in disbelief. Dwalin, on the other hand, as Bilbo was coming to realize bit by precious bit, was more of a person who started bawling their eyes out and blubbering like a toothless infant anytime a dear one came close to, say, the verge of death. It was all very hilarious if you looked at it a certain way, and so _ridiculously_ endearing that Bilbo would have smacked his own self upside the head if such a thing was possible in his present position.

After they had strapped Thorin down firmly in the claws of one of the truly massive eagles with their belts and Bilbo had made sure his trousers weren’t about to go falling down his knees any minute, the two of them had raced their way back to the battlefield, determined to make sure neither of the boys had managed to get themselves beheaded without supervision. Unfortunately, they had been way-laid by a bunch of straggling Orcs and goblins, the motley group looking as surprised to see the two of them darting their way down the spiral staircase as they themselves were. The surprise on their faces would have been comical in a different context—and also if their faces weren’t more squashed than Farmer Maggot’s rotten tomatoes—but they’d had a job to do, and a job they had done.

“Okay, look,” Bilbo began, trying to make himself sound as whiny and irritating as possible, and idly traced a deep scratch between the shoulder blades of Dwalin’s chestplate with a blood-crusted finger. “It wasn’t my fault that last one was pretending to be dead. How was I supposed to know?”

“You weren’t,” the war general answered him, wrapping his arm a little more securely where it was curled around the back of Bilbo’s knees. The shaft of his axe thumped ominously against the floor as he trudged on relentlessly. “Which is why it is even more important for you to stick to my side now.”

“The battle is over, Dwalin,” Bilbo said, trying to infuse a note of cheer and humour in his voice, but his words cracked half-way and in truth, he sounded absolutely pathetic. “There’s nothing left to hurt us now.”

“You got hit in the back of your head by a goblin you took for dead, Bilbo,” Dwalin reminded him, his tone stupidly fond (and almost cautious) as he replied. His grip tightened imperceptibly around their burglar, and Bilbo wouldn’t even have noticed if he hadn’t been bored out of his bloody mind, hanging upside down like a piece of bothersome luggage. “Don’t be so quick to make assumptions.”

They continued the descent down the steps of Ravenhill, both of them still too shaken to attempt a semblance of small talk. Even Bilbo, who was born and raised in a kingdom of gossip and passive-aggressive pleasantries, found himself falling silent under the tedious weight of it all. War had come upon them swifter than any could have realized, and he shuddered to think of the losses they must have incurred, trying to keep a fledgling kingdom from falling under the influence of darkness. It was a small relief, in a way, to have his back turned to the carnage and desolation that engulfed the valley in a shroud of mourning. Bilbo wasn’t stupid enough to turn away clever offerings of fate, even if it did involve him facing everything that came at them arse-first.

Contemplating upon the idea of loss was a notion that made the Hobbit shudder something fierce, so terrified was he of thinking of what could have happened while the three of them had been otherwise occupied in their mad little dance with some rather ugly partners in the courtyard of the northern watchtower. Bilbo was well aware of the long, loopy and mesmerizing string of _what-could-have-beens_ that was now tugging insistently at his ankles, the winding tentacle of a beast best left undisturbed so it could go and slink back to the stinking depths from whence it came. But Bilbo being Bilbo had gone ahead and prodded it with a metaphorical stick, gone ahead and lobbed rocks the size of his fist into the still water, and so the beast had heaved itself up on shore and chased after him, hissing and spitting and screeching all the way with the most ungainly rancor imaginable.

And unlike the Dwarves, Hobbits were not known to be naturally agile sprinters.

Terrible, terrible thoughts swallowed him up under a rising tide of horror, and Bilbo was left to do with nothing but blink stupidly and try to hold his breath so the nightmare could pass on ahead instead of delving down his throat and churning his all-too-eager gut. (He saw Ori—gentle, sweet, precious Ori—cut down in half by an Orc, lying somewhere off to the side, his bowl cut plastered limply to his split forehead. He saw Nori—clever, resourceful, wily Nori—staring up ahead at the sky with lifeless eyes, his nimble fingers chopped off and his meticulously designed hair caked over with blood. He saw Dori—brave, fussy, kind Dori—trampled under a pile of his defeated enemies, his lax hand still stretched out for his missing brothers. He saw Oìn—brash, blunt, cranky Oìn—having bled out to death somewhere obscure, his healing hands cut off completely at the shoulders. He saw Gloìn—loud, cheerful, boisterous Gloìn—with his axe still hefted in his lifeless hands, the laughter of his wife and son from better days still echoing in his deaf ears.

Bilbo saw Bombur—polite, lovely, friendly Bombur—with a sword driven hilt-deep into his gut, his form looking so small amidst the oozing heaps of carnage around him. He saw Bifur—quiet, observant, loyal Bifur—with his old battle wound and a hundred new ones, caught mid-way in calling out wordlessly for his fallen brothers. He saw Bofur—wonderful, hilarious, accepting Bofur—with his torso cleaved into two, his beloved hat lying askew atop his splintered head. He saw Fìli and Kìli—silly, reckless, radiant Fìli and Kìli—slain while protecting each other, Kìli wrapped close in Fìli’s broken arms, never to part even in death.)

What if all of that had truly happened? What if it had all come to pass? What if, when Bilbo and Dwalin arrived at the camp, they were informed of the demise of one of the Company, one of Bilbo’s own? How would he deal with it? He wasn’t strong enough, not when the mere thought of any of them—his friends, his _family_ —being gravely wounded was sufficient to send him reeling. What right did he have to be safe and uninjured, while the rest of them suffered? What prerogative was accorded to him, to escape unscathed while the people he loved walked on the edge of death, the balance as precarious as being poised on the point of a knife? What could he do, burglar and baggage that he had proven himself time and time again, which could make any difference to any of them, to _Thorin_?

Bilbo fervently wished the monster inside of his head would just go ahead and clamp its jaws down upon his face. Maybe that would shut up the voice in his ears.

“Hey.” Dwalin’s voice broke through the haze of his reverie, soft but firmly assertive enough to draw him out of the mist. His hand curled around Bilbo’s ankle, the slashed tatters of his gloves pressing into his numb flesh. “If I put you down now, you have to swear to not tell anyone my knees were aching again.”

A reckless little laugh exploded from Bilbo’s chest, and he closed his eyes briefly in silent gratitude. His voice wavered only a little as he answered. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Dwalin set him down gently, cradling the back of Bilbo’s head as he brought him down. “Oh, _come on_ ,” Bilbo muttered in mock annoyance, trying not to let his expression betray his blatant amusement in the face of Dwalin’s fussing. The war general didn’t even blink, merely let out a quiet huff of air as he bent a little to deposit their burglar safely on the ground. Bilbo opened his mouth, ready to tease him to high heaven for his age finally catching up to him, but he looked up then, and his mind _stopped_.

“Bilbo,” Dwalin murmured carefully in his ear after what seemed like an inestimable amount of time—it could have been a minute, an hour, a whole day, and Bilbo wouldn’t have had the faintest clue. A swift nudge to his side followed, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. “It’s better than it looks. Don’t dwell on it for long.”

The valley swelled out before them like an ocean of darkness, so massive and unending that Bilbo didn’t even dare to look at what awaited on the horizon. Piles of bodies lay heaped and scattered and strewn together, Dwarves and Elves and Men and Orcs alike, all mown down by fate, by the sharp ends of their enemy’s blades and the biting tang of their opponent’s iron. The blood and filth and muck painted the earth a sickly russet-black, all of it a symbol of the faltering duress of mortality. Sworn enemies they were and had always been, yet here they all lay—taken by the same faceless whisper, claimed by the same earth, bleeding the same blood. The dead formed crests in the ocean up ahead, tall and unmoving in the swiftly arriving cloak of night, yet to Bilbo’s horrified eyes, it seemed they stood poised on the edge of an unknown precipice, as if one little nudge would send them all roaring forward to consume the rest of them survivors, screaming of the lie of irreconcilable differences they were force-fed as the living, now lying united in death.

“Dwalin.” Bilbo’s hushed exhale of his name was little more than a gasp, little more than a wordless plea, but it seemed like the weary warrior knew him far better than he let on. Dwalin stepped up silently and dropped a heavy arm around his trembling shoulders.

 _I’m here_ , he didn’t say as he pressed closer to Bilbo’s shaking form, _I’ve got you now_.

People moved among the wreckage, Bilbo suddenly noticed as he absently followed the darting movements of a bobbing pinprick of light in the distance. “They’re looking for the wounded,” Dwalin told him, and both of them turned as one at the sound of familiar iron-tipped boots thundering over the earth and approaching them. Three Dwarves ran by, barely sparing a second glance to the two of them where they stood huddled together, followed closely by two Elves on their soundless tread, carrying what looked like a hastily constructed stretcher between them. Before their eyes, their forms were swallowed by the edging darkness, and Bilbo waited with bated breath, wondering what he would be seeing next.

A sudden wail of pain went up from where the five of them had gone, and Bilbo stepped back with a flinch. Hushed voices held together by a thread, trying to offer reassurance but barely managing to stabilize their own selves long enough to speak, rose in a muttering cloud, and he made out snatches of phrases spoken quietly and quickly. The rough voices of the Dwarves mingled with the smooth utterance of the Elves—saying _it’s_ _alright, we’re going to take you to the healers, you will be fine_ —but when a second voice joined in the cacophony with a keening howl in a wordless scream of pure anguish and loss, Bilbo turned instinctively in Dwalin’s arms and pressed his face to his chest.

“ _Dwalin_ ,” he choked out in a strangled whimper.

Dwalin held him fiercely, the waning strength of his arms unapparent in the force with which he pressed Bilbo’s shuddering form close. Bilbo squeezed his eyes shut, feeling a quick press of lips against the crown of his head before Dwalin pulled away. “Come on,” he said firmly, his eyes blazing as if he dared Bilbo to think otherwise. “Let’s go find the others.”

Dwalin steered him away from the battlefield with all the unmoving grace befitting a general, his arm curled protectively around Bilbo as he began to move, gently tugging the Hobbit in his wake. He moved with the utter surety of a hard-won experience, and absently, Bilbo remembered Bofur telling him about the battle of Khazâd-dum and the horrors they’d all had to face for Thròr’s determined attempt to reclaim their ancient kingdom. Not a single family had escaped the brunt of war, not a single household had been spared the resounding cries of pain over a loved one’s untimely loss. A few of the Company had fought, too, and lost much. Bifur had gained his head wound, the sons of Fundin had lost their parents, the banker and his brother had been robbed of their remaining family, Thorin had been thrust into an unwilling kingship. So much had been lost then, so much was lost now. But life endured with a stubborn single-mindedness, cruelly not granting the same fate to the ones who were left in the world of the living, and so, they were forced to go on. Family died, friends were lost, brothers-in-arms swept away, lovers parted and never returned, and yet, they were forced to go on.

Before he knew it, Bilbo had been shuffled off to the first line of encampment. The tents stretched out in a long line of cotton barricades, and it was clear that the silken green ones belonged to the Elves of Mirkwood while the dull wine reds had been erected by the Dwarves of the Iron Hills. People scurried around without seeming to give a single fuck about their own injuries, all governed by an unspoken rule: if you were fit enough to walk, you were fit enough to help. The Men and Elves dashed around in a flurry of robes and tattered wools, disappearing back into the gloom with stretchers and healing modules tucked away under their arms. Dwarves milled around, hastily constructing more and more tents to provide space for the wounded, lighting torches to show the way and helping to move the fallen out of the path to respectable places until further arrangements for cremation could be made.

The whole scene reeked of a cruel paradox: life thriving so vibrantly in a small space surrounded wholly by the gaping maw of death. To brighter minds, it could have appeared as a possibility for hope—like the flickering torches stabbed into the churned earth were beacons guiding lost souls back home—but _by Yavanna_ , Bilbo was feeling anything but optimistic at the moment. People back in the Shire could have called him morose and pessimistic all they cared, but if there was a pitcher, then it was fucking half-empty, damn what anyone else said. Wrapping things up in poetry and frilly laces wasn’t going to heal someone who had been impaled through the face, and that was a bloody fact.

“Out of the way!” A passing pair of men called as they thundered by, carrying a Dwarf on the litter between them. The Dwarf was twisting in agony, uttering low and guttural moans as he passed by them. A huge scar ran down the front of his chest, slicing him open to the navel, and the bleeding was so profuse it was dripping down his sides and to the cloth below.

“Bilbo,” Dwalin said lowly, leaning down to speak carefully in his ear. Bilbo tried to play off his startled jump as a mere twist of his limbs, but the warrior’s unamused expression put his babbling to ease. Ahead of them, the men carrying the Dwarf disappeared into one of the green tents, the flap left fluttering in their wake. “Let’s go,” he simply said, and used the hand on his shoulder to keep him plastered to his side as he began to walk through the camp.

Things seemed to get better as they headed along, people parting quietly before the two of them like waves breaking at the cliff-face. Bilbo sneaked a glance up at Dwalin’s impassive face, squinting carefully as he followed him silently. Had this grizzly old brute been something of a celebrity back in Ered Luin? Bilbo knew he’d been travelling with Dwarven royalty, of course, but were the others at the top of the pecking order as well? Dwalin shot him a scowl, but his beard was twitching and Bilbo truly wasn’t one to be dissuaded so easily. He scuttled closer under the war general’s arm, who only rolled his eyes and held him firmly, and Bilbo tried not to giggle like a pig as he saw a few passers-by shoot them wide-eyed and stunned glances.

Small campfires blazed lowly in fire-pits along a wide central path, where most of the traffic seemed to rush by. Low sounds of pain and broken wails echoed from most of the tents along the way, so horribly gut-wrenching that Bilbo would have thrown up everything in his stomach had he not done that already, and all over Dwalin’s boots as well. The dull clunk of armour and the sliding hiss of chainmail being removed and tossed away accompanied the thud of people running past, the quiet mutterings of healers everywhere posed as the unwavering background. A lot of Dwarves bowed shallowly as Dwalin passed, but all men and elves moving along looked at Bilbo with obvious recognition shining in their eyes. Bilbo tried not to react in any way, but he shrank back a little more with every assessing gaze.

“Dàin!” Dwalin called out thickly, the suddenness of his voice cutting through the murk of confused pondering in Bilbo’s head. His arm slipped from his shoulders, and Dwalin began hurrying forward to two figures standing by a wine-red Dwarven tent with a gait that Bilbo would have loudly compared to the old Thain’s precocious little waddle at any other time, but it was not that day. “ _Dàin_!”

“Dwalin!” One of the figures peeled itself away from the brace, and all of a sudden Dwalin was being lifted clean off the ground in what was possibly the most gentle bear-hug anyone had ever received. The war general let out a punched sort of sound, like someone had stepped on his chest with his favourite pair of weighted travelling boots, and he dropped his hammer onto the ground with a loud clatter. “You bastard, you’re alive!”

“Bilbo?” The man standing next to him said, his voice strained and stretched thin, heavy with pain yet strung through with a few silvery stands of hope. He stepped forward with a barely concealed limp, one hand curled protectively around his side. “Bilbo Baggins, tell me that is you.”

Bilbo suddenly noticed that he had been staring blankly at the man’s face with a detached sort of recognition; the gaunt lines etched around a ruggedly handsome face jogged his memory, and with a gasp of thrilled surprise, he surged forward with a hysterical burst of laughter, his arms thrown wide open.

“Bard, it is so _fucking_ good to see you, I swear,” he cried out, feeling like an absolute idiot for being so slow on the uptake but realizing he couldn’t be bothered to give a shit. Bard, for his credit, let out a tired exhale and positively crushed Bilbo to his chest. He smelled of blood and sweat and grime, but the hands resting on his back were shivering lightly. Bilbo wrenched himself free to stare at the face of the man he’d come close to considering a friend in the whirl of the last fortnight, and his heart pounded furiously in his chest as he met his dazed eyes. “The kids are alright, aren’t they? Was the city breached?”

“It was breached, yes,” Bard nodded grimly, his jaw tensed as he chewed over the words in his head. “We lost a lot more people than we’d anticipated, and we’re working ourselves to the bone to find the survivors.” He bit the inside of his cheek, tongue prodding absently at the flesh. “We were robbed of many friends today. These are dark days, indeed.”

“Bard, your children are fine.” Bilbo insisted, the vice of fear tightening slow and slower around his throat. He shook Bard’s shoulder lightly, feeling the tensed muscles beneath, and tried not to let his desperation show. “Tell me they’re fine.”

“They’re alive,” Bard answered, and his gaze dropped to the frayed ends of his rotting coat. Bilbo noted, with no small sense of dawning horror, that it was completely soaked through with blood. “They were… attacked. A troll had come after them first, but with sheer luck, I’d managed to get there in time. Before I left, I entrusted them to get the women and children to safety.” He swallowed, throat bobbing furiously as he visibly schooled himself to a semblance of calmness. “A pack of Orcs found them just as they were about to shut the doors.”

“Oh, no,” Bilbo breathed softly, and reached out to take one of Bard’s shaking hands in his own. He squeezed the scraped palms lightly, prompting him to continue. “Bard?”

“They saved the women and children, managed to corral them into the halls in time. But the pack—they came for Tilda,” he replied, sounding like someone had wrung him out inside and out and then tossed his heart away into the dirt. Bard gulped audibly, his fingers spasming in Bilbo’s hands, as if he were itching to reach for a weapon that wasn’t there. “Bain and Sigrid noticed, of course, and they leapt forward to save her. Bain broke his leg and Sigrid was struck in the head, but—” The breath in his chest stuttered, like a serpent congealing and twisting within his chest. “But Tilda and Bain got her inside.”

“Oh Bard, you must be _so_ proud of them. They’re such terribly brave children for doing what grown people would have hesitated before carrying out.” Bilbo whispered, tugging at his wrists to draw Bard back from the keening abyss of his dark thoughts. He pressed down with careful fingertips at the jagged lines cut into his palms—wounds from untangling rolls of barbed wire, perhaps—and frowned lightly down at it. “And you should also have someone take a look at these. This is just nasty.”

“He’s right, you know.” A new voice came from behind them in the low and commanding tenor of one used to giving orders on a regular basis, and Bilbo swiveled around in place immediately to look at the figure standing next to Dwalin. The Dwarf in question was positively massive, as tall and broad and grizzled as the war general himself, clad in armour that would have been resplendent had it not been for the massive stains of Orc blood all over its shiny surface. His piercing gaze snapped from Bilbo to Bard, and he walked towards them, leaning his weight on a truly terrifying behemoth of an axe at his side. “Sigrid is asleep, the healers are with her. You should go, too.”

“I have work to do,” Bard said stiffly, but not unkindly. His shoulders were hunched. “I cannot leave my people when they need me.”

“Yes, because you’re going to be of so much help to everyone with flayed hands and a leg that you can’t stand on for more than ten minutes,” Bilbo snorted, then shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t be a fool, Bard. Take a little while off, check in your children, see the healers, rest your leg, then join up with us when you’re feeling better.”

Bard blinked, seeming to be at a sudden loss. “I can assure you I’m—”

“Take it from someone who’s watched people trying to work themselves into an early grave,” Dwalin cut in firmly, holding up a hand to stall whatever reasons Bard was trying to come up with to keep working. “No, _quiet_. You can’t do much if you’re dead on your feet, alright? If your daughter did take a hit to the head, she’s probably going to sleep for a while until she recovers. Be there for her when she wakes up instead of lying face-first on the cot next to her, maybe?”

“And make sure she doesn’t move around too much afterwards,” Bilbo added with a wince, pressing the back of his hand tentatively against his forehead and feeling the makeshift bandage they had hurriedly fashioned from a strip of Dwalin’s tunic scrape roughly against his raw skin. “Or get up too quickly, or talk, or blink.”

“She is going to throw up,” Dwalin stated decisively with a curt nod. “Don’t listen to her if she tells you she’s feeling well enough to walk.”

The Dwarf standing next to Dwalin gave him a bemused look-over. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience, cousin,” he remarked coolly, but his eyes under his smashed-in helm slid to Bilbo with a lazily evaluative stare. “Did you happen to be struck in the head, Master Baggins?”

“Not struck, no,” Bilbo said solemnly, curling his palm over his empty scabbard. “I got fucking _brained_.”

Bard sniggered indelicately, and the Dwarf let out a bellow of laughter—weighted and measured, but still strangely pleasant. Bilbo found himself fighting an involuntary smile; next to him, Dwalin rolled his eyes. “Don’t let him fool you, Dàin. He’ll outwit you thrice over before you begin to realize you’ve been robbed blind.”

“Oh, shut up, Dwalin, it’s not my fault you cannot bluff to save your life.” Bilbo huffed around a rising chuckle, ducking out of the way when Dwalin made a grab for him. Bard, still smiling with the lingering exhaustion, bowed politely to all three of them and disappeared into one of the green silk tents erected a few yards away. Bilbo watched him go until the blood-starched tails of his coat vanished behind the flaps, his mind still reeling in thoughts of three young children pushed headfirst into a war that did not belong to them or theirs.

Dwalin’s hand between his shoulder blades suddenly brought him back to the present, and he twisted around to shoot an apologetic grimace at the two Dwarves who stood patiently behind him, watching him stare off into the edge of night with a face that would have rivaled the morose protagonists of his father’s favourite romance novels. “Come on,” Dwalin simply said. “Let’s get you to a healer as well.”

“No, what? _No_.” Bilbo immediately answered, wrenching himself away with a firm tug. He wrapped his arms around his aching torso, glaring up at his friend with defiance. “We’re going to find the boys and the rest of the Company first, make sure they’re alright. Then we’re going to go find Thorin so I can slap him again if he tries anything funny.”

“You _slapped_ Thorin?” The Dwarf repeated incredulously.

Bilbo held up a finger. “In my defense, he was trying to be noble and had his own obituary planned out in his head.”

“He just whacked him across the face. _Hard_.” Dwalin confirmed, tilting his head gruffly at his companion even when he reached out to lightly pat Bilbo on the pack. “Under different circumstances, watching him come back to life would’ve been hilarious, but we had a job to do.”

Dàin turned to look at Bilbo, an eyebrow cocked. “He started crying, didn’t he.”

Bilbo nodded. “Like a baby.”

Dàin laughed under his breath, shaking his head from side-to-side under that crushed helm of his, completely bypassing Dwalin’s indignant protests with a resolute grit that spoke of years of patience and familial teasing, a thought which made a pang of longing spike through Bilbo’s heart. The three of them fell silent as two men shuffled past them, an Elf propped up between them. The Elf’s hair was grimy and sooty, two crude Orc arrows sticking out of their shoulders, and their head lolled listlessly as the men hurried them into an Elven healing tent. Dàin stared after them for a quiet minute, before he spoke in a low voice, barely above a whisper. “Fìli took a nasty blow to his temple. His brother and the Elf Captain are with him. I believe the Mirkwood prince is healing him.”

Bilbo made a horrified noise deep in his throat, floundering uselessly for the correct words he could wrangle into making a semblance of sense. Dwalin got there first, gripping Dàin’s arms tight in his own vice-like grip. “What? Where are they now? Will they be alright?”

“They’re going to be fine, cousin.” Dàin answered, completely unruffled in the face of the war general’s ire, and propped his axe against his hip as he gently reached up to disentangle Dwalin’s painful hold on him. “We were briefly separated when the bulk of the battle was over, and I believe a stray Orc was about to swing a mace at Kìli, so his brother stepped in. I had him sent to Oìn immediately, but he had his hands full taking care of Thorin. He looked him over still and told us it wasn’t lethal, so we let the Elves step in and tend to him after that.”

“You really shouldn’t have sent him there alone,” Dwalin snarked, still bristling at the edges.

Dàin, thankfully, seemed perfectly used to and hence unaffected by his prickly demeanour. “Don’t fret so much, Dwalin. I made sure to send two of my trusted guards along with the boys. Although,” here he paused and inclined his head to one side, his ocean eyes looking through them with deadly accuracy, “Nori of the ’Ri brothers volunteered to go along with them. Balin personally vouched for him, so I had no qualms in sending him along.”

“Oh, _thank fuck_ ,” Bilbo breathed out, sagging in relief where he stood. Nori would never have budged from the side of either of his brothers if anything bad had gone down, so Bilbo could be reassured that the ’Ri brothers were all safe and healthy. Balin too was alright, since he had talked to Dàin and probably discussed the logistics of the whole shebang with him, so that was another one who was quite alright, along with Oìn. Fìli would be, if Dàin’s assurance was anything to go by, and Kìli choosing to stay by his side meant he had escaped relatively unharmed too.

“Do not worry, Master Baggins,” Dàin addressed him then, his unnerving gaze trained upon him. His beard twitched the smallest amounts, as if he was suppressing an amused smile, but his face was kindly. “Balin took stock of the entire Company as soon as he got back, and he informed me that they’re all alive, none having sustained any life-threatening injuries but for Thorin himself.” His expression turned rueful here, lips quirked in a wry smile. “You’re all a hardy bunch. When a dragon could not bring you death and defeat, what chance do a few straw-headed Orcs stand against you?”

“This is not the time to turn against yourself, Dàin.” Dwalin interjected roughly, looking thoroughly irritated at the prospect of having to try and cheer someone up, even though he sounded extremely relived on hearing of the fate of their friends. “There will be plenty of time for introspection later.”

“Aye,” Dàin agreed, smiling bitterly. “On how I abandoned the Dwarf I considered my own brother, simply because I was too afraid of risking the lives of my people on a quest to reclaim our homeland.”

Dwalin snickered, crossing his arms gingerly over his chest. “It was a doomed venture from the start, and you know it. Thorin would never hold your choice against you, not when he knows better than anyone else what it means to put your people above all else. Mahal, there was no one more surprised than him when we woke up every day and found ourselves still alive and with all our limbs intact.”

Dàin still looked beat, but he managed to muster up an indulgent grin. “Did you find a bit of luck along the way?”

Dwalin’s smile was fond as he turned to look at Bilbo, and it seemed to take two decades off his worn face. “We wouldn’t have made it this far, otherwise.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Bilbo complained, pushing at his chest lightly. “You’re such a sap, it’s disgusting.”

“Aw, are you not feeling better after that?” Dwalin teased him, slinging his good arm around Bilbo’s shoulders and yanking him hard against his side. “Do you want me to ask Ori to write you some poetry? We could all sign the card, Fìli could forge Thorin’s signature, maybe the boys could add in a few lines of their own on his behalf.”

“I suppose that could work,” Bilbo mused, resting his head against Dwalin’s shoulder and gazing out at the growing bustle of the encampment around them. “The most romantic thing Thorin’s ever said to me is telling me I have ‘keen eyes’. You lot might just be doing a whole lot of good, instead.”

Dàin laughed, and the whole world around them seemed to brighten up a little as he did. His teeth gleamed bright beneath his helm, mouth stretched in pleased smile. “You’re a bold creature, Master Baggins. No wonder everyone is so enamoured with you.”

“Fear is a powerful aphrodisiac,” Bilbo shrugged gracefully, and the two Dwarves burst out laughing again. He grinned, and shook his head politely. “And just Bilbo, please. Master Baggins sound a little too formal and stuffy for my taste.”

“ _We_ called you Master Baggins,” Dwalin pointed out.

“Yes,” Bilbo nodded. “And I hated every minute of it.”

“Very well, then.” Dàin remarked lightly, but the reverence and amusement was bright as day on his slowly purpling face. “I am very pleased to meet you, Bilbo. I am Dàin Ironfoot, Lord of the Iron Hills, cousin to the line of Durin,” and here, he gave a most exaggerated flourish of his hand, stooping into as low a bow as he could manage, leaning on his axe, “and your most willing servant.”

“Oh. _Ironfoot_. I’ve heard of you before; I know you.” Bilbo suddenly started, frowning lightly at his muddled memory. Had the wound to his head managed to rattle entire hours of his remembrance and send them down the drain? “You’re the one who rode to war on a fucking _pig_.”

Dàin looked fit to burst from trying not to laugh too hard, face blotched and shoulders shaking. “If it were anyone but you who said that, I would have felled your head from your shoulders for that slight.” The Lord smiled then, wan but still weighty, bowing shallowly again. “But since it is you, o beautiful one, I will forgive that little error and not hold you to it henceforth.”

“Thorin is going to stab the shit out of you when he wakes up,” Dwalin told him sagely.

“No, I’ll protect him.” Bilbo said, and turned back to Dàin. “You look different without your pig horns.”

Dàin glossed over Dwalin’s snickering, instead managing to look equal parts offended and bemused at Bilbo’s blatant disrespect. “Pigs don’t have horns; I wear _boar tusks_.” He brought up a hand to smooth down the flattened front of his helm, as if someone had tried to cave his head in in the middle of the battle. “The beloved ones from my old steed got ripped off of my beard sometime.”

“A pity, I’m sure,” Bilbo hummed quietly, turning away to look around the camp. The mountain loomed ahead of them, the jagged periphery of its silhouette standing stark against the inky night sky, still mottled purple and blue in places as if it too were bruised in the war waged beneath its watchful eye. Dwarves and Men and Elves alike milled around, dashing to gather supplies and haul in the survivors, a uniformly measured haste in all of their actions. It was a surreal sight, seeing the races united thusly, and in a flash of realization that swallowed him quicker than the sweeping night, Bilbo knew that he would steal a thousand more Arkenstones, risk a thousand more friendships, and fight a thousand more battles—if only it meant they would continue to keep this hard-won peace.

Both Dàin and Dwalin were looking at him with something akin to tenderness in their usually grim faces. Dàin spoke first, limping towards him with a heavy gait. “Come on, then,” he said gently, his eyes still so unnervingly evaluative as he met his gaze. “Do you want to see the boys first, or the King?”

Bilbo shared a look with Dwalin. “The boys first, please,” he replied, sighing lowly in his chest as he thought of Fìli’s lovely golden hair lank with matted blood, of Kìli’s youthful face marred by the ravages of an inevitable war that still came far too soon for both of them. “Thorin would want to know how they fare.”

“Of course,” Dàin said graciously, and gripped the shaft of his massive axe firmly. “Follow me, please.”

Bilbo watched Dàin set off along the main route at an unhurried pace with a distracted sort of observance, as if the Lord of the Iron Hills knew it would take him some time to catch up to him, in more ways than one. A pair of Dwarves was brought in before their eyes, one of them screaming themselves hoarse as they shook the other’s shoulder. He watched the first Dwarf’s hands come away stained with blood where they had alighted on the other’s breastplate, and an uneasy feeling reared up its head in his roiling stomach.

“Bilbo,” Dwalin said, stepping up to stand next to him, his arm brushing familiarly against Bilbo’s shoulder. “I’m going to be right by your side the whole time, I swear it.” He looked exhausted, battered and beaten down, little parts of him chipped away with every blow and every strike until naught but husk remained, and yet Dwalin grinned down at him with all the strength of a warrior and a friend, standing strong and unflinching in an ocean of death. “If Thorin tries to die again, you have my blessings in breaking his delicate nose.”

In spite of himself, Bilbo snorted. “ _Delicate_ , my ass. He could skewer a brace of conies on that thing and roast them over a fire.”

“You’re such a bully.” Dwalin laughed, the scratched and throaty sound reminding him of warm green glades and pots of honey at Beorn’s and whetstones tossed at each other’s face over the roaring campfires. “Come on, then,” he said, squeezing his shoulder gently, and smiled. “Let’s go scream at some Kings.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi, this is a gentle reminder that i work my ass off like all other authors to write these chapters, and i would really really appreciate to hear what you think of it. something, anything, honestly. it is extremely discouraging to know you poured your heart and soul into something, only for everyone to maintain a radio silence on it.


	3. old timers, old friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oín groaned. “It’s called lightening the mood, Balin. The kid looked like he was seconds away from sobbing his fucking eyes out.”  
> Balin stared at him. “And the first thing that came to mind was joking about making Bilbo scrub his own vomit?”

Balin has seen a lot of shit in his life, although he supposes part of it comes from being a Dwarf of Erebor in the end. When the curtains go down and the dust settles and the god-awful fire-breathing lizards crawl back to whatever hell they came from with a particularly well-aimed arrow to the breast, what’s left is a group of ragged old timers who’ve gone white and balding from the stress and shock value of all the bullshit they’ve had to deal with on a day-to-day basis leading up to that very specific moment. He wishes— Mahal, he wishes so _desperately_ that he could blame their predicament on anything and everything other than their heritage and cursed ancestry, but no, _fuck no_. They are a people cursed with the hardest heads out of all of Mahal’s children, they’re the ones who’ve been destined to fall into the throes of sickness over a cold, cold metal they begin to value more than the pulsing warm blood of their dear ones, and they’re the ones who have to stand by, too terrified with fear to do anything but watch as the ones they’ve loved as their own drown into the seductive lure of gold and cast them away like bothersome parts of an invention that only serve to hinder progress in the long run.

Balin wishes he hadn’t have had to witness that particular horror on his own. Mahal knows he would’ve been beyond content hearing of it in a dim tavern after a tiring day of work, nursing a mug of ale and feeling that detached sense of pity wash over him that is a staple whenever you heard of so-and-so going through a tough time, but you’ve never actually met them, so you just nod your head and grumble softly and say _oh no, tch tch, that’s so terrible, I do hope they’re fine now_ , and then you go back to laughing with your friends and family over that one absolutely chaotic Durin’s Day festivities where someone accidentally set fire to the shed that you cherish with well-meaning ribbing and a lot of pointed eyebrow waggling to that day. Balin wishes so fervently that that was his lot, that he would have heard of the madness of Thorin II Oakenshield, the newly instated King Under the Mountain, from word-of-mouth in a dusty tavern that reeked of sweat and miner’s dust, just so he wouldn’t have had to feel so utterly helpless standing beside him at the battlements of their hard-won city and know, with a dawning sense of regret, that he could have done nothing more to help.

Balin has never been a Dwarf made for the primal, romantic sort of love. He’s seen people around him fall in the arms of that temptress too often, has laughed and clapped them on their backs and given them his heartiest congratulations , but he’s never experienced it on his own. In his youth, he had held out a lot of hope— growing up in a family like theirs, seeing their parents be so grossly in love with each other would have definitely swayed the minds of the strongest of Dwarves, and Balin had never claimed to be the most steadfast of them all. He had dreamed of having his own family, his own children, a loving partner he could come home to at the end of the day and know with a bone-deep certainty that he would always find welcome here, that no other place in the world would hold as much comfort for him as the arms of the one he would love in this life and in all the next.

When the dragon came from the North in a blinding flare of fire and fury, levelling entire settlements in the blink of an eye and laying waste to the thriving green valley of Erebor, things like love and belongingness took a back seat when there were so much else to care about. Balin knows with a sinking and wry sense of finality, in all that haste and confusion and columns of billowing smoke with people jostling each other and tripping over themselves trying to run to safety and fresh air, that even if he’d ran headfirst into the love of his life, he would have shoved past them and gone on ahead with his work. Because that’s one of the defining traits of the sons of Fundin—it always has been— they’ll put nothing else above their duty to their King, to their Kingdom, to their people. He doesn’t even feel mildly apologetic about it; there’s no way he would have managed to ask someoneover for dinner when they had been rendered homeless because of a goddamned _dragon_ , for Mahal’s sake. Some things were better off left undiscovered.

Service and loyalty are traits that have flowed through the veins of all descendants of Durinlike a benevolent gift from their Maker. Balin knows it well, knows what that hot and pulsating thrum of fealty feels like as it makes its slow and languorous sway through his starch-blue veins, knows what that heady sense of being commanded by the King to do good by their people feels like as it curls soft and wanton around his head. There’s never been a sliver of doubt in Balin’s mind about it, never the briefest thought of establishing his own Lordship darting through a power-addled brain. He knows his place, and he knows it well. He is to stand by the King, through peace and war, through plenty and poverty, through celebration and mourning, and he is to be the King’s anchor when the waves of opposition and a rampant sense of loss steal clarity of thought from the head that wears the crown. It is easy to drift off among the boot-lickers and the sycophants and the blind horde of followers, to lose sight of who you are and what you’ve been sent to the world to do when all you can think of is your throne and your axe and your gold, when all you can see is the shine of metal and the sluggish flow of the enemy’s blood dancing before your eyes like a tantalising vision, so near and so easy to reach out and take.

That is where Balin is to step in, for he is to be the grounding force, the gravity that holds the King down when the buoyancy of praise attempts to cut him off from the realm of mortals; that is where Balin has always done his best to step in. He hasn’t always succeeded, hasn’t always been able to drag the King back from the gaping maw of the unfathomable abyss before him, hasn’t always been able to employ his carefully honed words and his famed tact to convince their reigning monarch to take a step back, to grip the rail, to haul himself back from taking just one misplaced step and pitching forward into that bottomless pit of despair and ill-health. He saw the madness gather Thrór in her bejewelled arms, saw the light of reason and rationality fade from his eyes and be replaced by the dull lifeless glow of coins and coronets, saw the King he’d followed and served since the day he first took breath be replaced by a Dwarf he did not know anymore— a creature so wrapped in his own greed, he threatened to fell the head of his own grandson for dragging him away from his beloved treasure.

(Balin wondered sometimes, if, in a different world and a different reality, the dragons had once been of flesh and blood and bones just like them. He thought he could have grown to pity them.)

The haunted look in the royal family’s eyes still plagued Balin, creeping up on him from the gathering shadows like a swirling vortex of painful memories and cocooning him with unsolicited reminders of young faces twisted over in fear, Frerin standing dutifully with his arm wrapped around their sister, and a much younger Thorin tugging absently at his sleeve as he asked, _is there nothing we can do, Balin, there_ must _be something, you must think of something, please_. Thráin had been a little too lost, a little too disoriented, a little too broken to even consider stepping up to take the throne their people needed so desperately in that moment. Thrór, still caught up in the throes of his sickness—having lost his treasure, his wife, his daughter-in-law, the people he’d sworn to protect— had had a strange glimmer in his eyes, like there was something he had resolved himself to carry out, something which would require the strongest and hardest of wills—the will of one who dared to call himself a King.

Balin had done his best to dissuade his proposed venture, to plead the futility of the war Thrór had declared without any prior consultation with his war council, or the scattered few that remained of them, anyway. But no; the proclamation had come cracking down on their still steaming and smoking forms with all the indifferent swiftness of a bosun’s whip, hard and brutal, leaving behind inch-deep scars gouged into charred flesh. Balin had stood by and watched with a sick sort of fascination as the few who’d managed to survive the dragon-fire put on their soot-streaked armour with hands that shook and shook until someone else had to step in and strap them inside with a grim finality, like this was an inevitable end that they’d all foreseen and lost hope of ever escaping. He’d held Dís as she sobbed and raged, seeing her father (Thráin, shivering in his breastplate and staring off into the distance) and her brothers (Frerin, still so young, still so devastatingly innocent; Thorin, his jaw taut and his eyes eerily blank) and her cousins (Dwalin, his back ramrod straight; Balin himself with his helm tucked under one elbow) and her King (Thrór, firm and unyielding, his axe grasped like a clutch in his hands, the gold of his marriage beads still shining dully in the pale morning) and her people bundle off and head off to the valley of Khazâd-dum, to the kingdom of Durin the Deathless, to the ancient mines that called them home.

There was a saying among the Dwarves, that there was no greater pride to be accorded by the Valar than a warrior who fell in the defence of his hearth, his home, his kingdom. Balin often wondered, in the dead of nights when he found sleep eluding him her tender embrace, whether Thrór—madness driven, sickness taken, gold greedy, fallen, famed _King Thrór_ of the line of Durin— had died an honourable death or not.

It was a warped, malevolent reminder of his initial failure, seeing the Dwarf he’d practically thought of as his own son be taken by the same madness that Balin had been helpless to prevent the first time round. Seeing the bright light of hope and reason dim and disappear from Thorin’s eyes the moment the gold had reflected off his dilated pupils in his grandfather’s coveted treasury had been as painful as someone ripping entire chunks of throbbing flesh from his body and tossing them to the wolves. The ache of his inability to help had somehow struck him to the quick even deeper this time around, for he had seen Thorin despise and resent the pull of the gold on Thrór for decades, only to be engulfed in it the moment he came within range of her tempting call. It was worse because of the exact strain of personal involvement, seeing a dear one be lost to a sea of unfeeling metal, and knowing your pleas would fall onto deaf ears, or worse— reflect off an indifferent heart.

But all wasn’t lost, after all. Balin had always privately scoffed at the silly and flamboyant declarations by the bards and minstrels from the Durins’ old halls— the bedecked and fancy singers and musicians who sang epic ballads of old under the lazy glow of candlelight about finding a flicker of hope in a shroud of darkness, of monarchs from different worlds who fought for what was right, of people as frail as gusts of winds but possessed with the gravity of power far beyond the mortal realm. It had all seemed so utterly stupid, so fictional; for how could anyone encounter any such being and know, with an unfailing surety, that they were the one who held the key to everyone’s salvation? It might have once been alluring to him in his youth when he had the time and energy to entertain fanciful notions, but after Smaug, nothing was the same anymore. It had been difficult to seek the radiance of a person’s heart when the smoke made it nigh impossible to find the road ahead of you.

Bilbo Baggins was not what Balin had been expecting. A lifetime of shoving court etiquettes and proper manners down the throats of Dwalin, Thorin and Dís and the latter’s exhausting brood of offsprings had been dragged into smooth employment, as Balin had done his best to welcome their burglar into the Company. He hadn’t really approved at first; yet, what choice had they but to trust Tharkûn and his wisdom from the ages past? Besides, Balin had always had a bit of a soft spot for Bilbo— he had been very visibly out of his depth in terrains he had never seen from his comfortable home, surrounded by a group of thick-headed warriors he had never met before, led by a Dwarf who so stubbornly refused to accept his singular obsession with their burglar that he skipped the pleasantries altogether and went straight to the sort of familiar hostility one found themselves saddled with after knowing Thorin intimately for a few decades. It had been crystal clear that Bilbo had been struggling to find his footing in an unfamiliar environment, and Thorin had done nothing but shove him recklessly, dangerously, until he was mere moments away from tipping off the edge.

The first time Balin had seen their burglar scream at Thorin, the first thought that had gone through his head was, _oh, he’s not poor Mister Baggins after all_ , which was incredibly hilarious in hindsight, considering he was to become the King’s Consort soon enough and all that. He doesn’t even remember what they had been arguing about— knowing Thorin’s affinity for masking his blatant affection for people under a guise of harsh words and a completely backwards system of protectiveness, it was almost definitely his fault, and Bilbo had finally just _snapped_. It had been such a dreadfully glorious sight; Balin had stood there spellbound, Dwalin had been moved to tears, the princes appeared mere seconds away from kneeling before their burglar, the rest of the Company had looked like they were about to keel over in shock, some of them clutching their chests like their lungs had given up on them already, and all the while, Bilbo had raged and _thundered_ and shouted with such a stunning ferocity that it looked like Thorin had accidentally swallowed his tongue half-way through their argument. The Hobbit had walked off in a flurry of threadbare waistcoat and cowlick curls, while Thorin had stood there gaping, his mouth open comically wide, and Balin had thought to himself in a sudden inescapably fond and fatherly moment of clarity, _oh, oh dear, you poor little thing, you don’t stand a fucking chance, do you_.

The thing about Bilbo Baggins of the Shire, the very first quality to his slight and gentle frame that struck the non-suspecting people around him was the sheer enormity of his bravery. To the eyes of outsiders, the possibility of a fragile-looking Hobbit possessing a spine stronger than the silver steel of mithril might seem inconceivable, but to the Company of Thorin Oakenshield, it was not a simple question anymore. Bilbo was stronger in will than the sturdiest of warriors, braver than a lion, shrewder than a fox, his tongue sharper than the blades of the First Age. He’d stepped in, time and time again, to intervene in every opportunity of danger that presented itself before them, and he’d stood his ground with the unyielding grace of a being possessed with divinity and an otherworldly magic. He’d laughed with the young ones and regaled them with stories from his homeland, had talked to the older ones with solemn respect to their greater age and experience, had slowly and gently unravelled the tightly knotted distinctions of class and birth in their motley group until they’d all learnt to value each other not just in the heat of battle, but under the quiet blanket of stars around a roaring campfire, trading tales of humour and wit and valour back and forth without a pause, until the bonds of loyalty and brotherhood between them began to run deeper than flesh and blood in their weary but willing forms.

Perhaps the strangest and the most wonderful change that Bilbo Baggins had wrought in their midst was the blatant shift in the dynamics of leadership within the Company of Thorin Oakenshield. As the days had passed, Bilbo had slowly but surely been involved in the central decision-making, his intelligence and objective logics of rationality earning him the respect of each Dwarf in their group. Thorin’s clear fascination with the Hobbit and his miserably bumbling attempts at impressing him had made Balin groan in agony, watching from a safe distance, but Bilbo had always laughed and awkwardly dismissed the King with an uncomfortable sort of kindness, like his affection wasn’t something he wished to believe and he’d rather be turning a blind eye towards, for now. After Azog had nearly chopped off Thorin’s head and simultaneously given Balin a heart attack while dangling off a burning tree over a cliff, however, Bilbo had punched Thorin in the arm so viciously that Dwalin had winced in sympathy from the side, then grabbed the front of his surcoat and hauled him down for a searing kiss. Thorin had had to be supported down the side of the Carrock after, so bad was the shaking in his knees, but Balin had had a sneaking suspicion that it was less due to his injuries and more so because of a certain burglar who still looked so furious that no one had dared to approach him where he’d been striding forward next to Tharkûn at the head of their group, his sword resting so habitually at his hip, stained black and red with the blood of Orc and Wargs alike, as if it were always meant to be there. Balin had tamped down the twinge of pity that arose in his heart at the sight, and tried not to think too much about what it meant for Bilbo Baggins any longer.

In true Durin fashion, Thorin had very loudly and very boldly declared his undying love for Bilbo standing atop a rather rickety chair for someone who’d just shattered half his ribcage not a few hours ago at the house of the shape-shifter Beorn, and— Balin was very pleased to note— he’d only stuttered twice during his speech, looking mere seconds away from throwing up from a bad case of nerves. It was only after Bilbo had laughed pleasantly and pushed him down to rest with a placating peck to his bruised cheek that Thorin had looked less like someone was about to shave him bald in his sleep and more like a thoroughly besotted fool who wouldn’t mind if his lover shaved him bald in his sleep. The whole spectacle had been incredibly endearing, and Balin had knocked his shoulder amicably against Tharkûn’s when the wizard had looked a little too close to tears for any of their liking, sniffing loudly and thundering at Thorin to _take care of him, or I’ll tie you to a tree by your braids and leave you there, do you hear me, son of Thráin, I’m talking to you_. Beorn, bless his kind heart, had cracked open a few kegs of ale for the celebration of their courtship; all in all, it had been a most remarkable day, if you took into account the capture and the escape and the attack and the bloody _trees_ and the fire and the near-death experiences and the subsequent screaming, and if Balin had shed a few tears of disbelief that nobody in their midst was missing a few critical limbs, no one had dared to call him out on it, otherwise.

There had been too few opportunities of joy granted to the line of Durin in the last two hundred years, too little chances for them to express gratitude with the humility that they’d been forced to learn under the rule of a too-young Prince over their too-tired people. Bilbo Baggins, however, was, without a shred of doubt, the best thing that had happened to them since the birth of the sons of Dís. The refined edge to his every word clashed against the honest bluntness of Thorin’s tirades; the calculating glimmer in his eyes matched the boiling emotions in Thorin’s gaze; the open affection and familiarity in his friendly gestures slotted with the firm reticence of Thorin’s kingly behaviour. Every little detail, every minor facet to their personalities, each string of fate interlocked and wove through into a single tapestry so intricate and beautiful that it became impossible to see where one began and the other ended; and when they laughed in harmony—light and dark, hard and soft, day and night, King and Consort— the night sky seemed to thrum in anticipation of the great age that they would usher in together, side by side, etching out a new dawn that would shine upon all of Middle Earth.

Balin had suffered a lot in his life, and had seen a lot of suffering, as well. Very few memories, however, could claim to have wrenched a flaming hot dagger into his side deeper than the stunned look on Bilbo’s face as he’d looked at Thorin once the dragon had been slain by the Bowman, when their King had refused flatly to offer any sort of aid to the people of Lake-Town. Bilbo’s expression had shuttered down, a veil falling over his soft features as he’d stared at Thorin’s retreating back disappear into the gloomy halls of the treasury. As the days had passed and they’d been told ( _ordered_ , not asked) to search for the Arkenstone, Bilbo had seemed to hunch in on himself more and more with every hour the rest of the Company spent digging around on hands and knees for the stone. He’d stood by Thorin’s side because he, too, had been commanded to not leave the King’s side, but his face had spoken volumes of his desire to be anywhere but next to the Dwarf he very clearly could not recognise any longer as the one he’d fallen in love with. His smiles had been grim and wan, stretched too thin, and the gauntness to his skin had seemed to have seeped into his entire demeanour, closed off and uncharacteristically silent, until he spoke to no one at all, only shuffling along quietly in Thorin’s wake, like a tethered shadow.

Balin had seen a glimpse of the old Bilbo shining through his pointed hypocritical questions just a few days later, and his heart had thudded so furiously that the room had appeared to hum and rumble with the sound of an unspoken impending doom. Balin had worried so terribly for Bilbo, had grasped his wrist and pleaded with him to think it through and not make any rash decisions, for there could be no telling what Thorin would do once he found out about his betrayal. Bilbo— lovely, sweet, trusting, naïve Bilbo— had only smiled and shaken his head, his wayward curls splayed flat across his haunted face, and told Balin he’d be fine, Thorin wouldn’t do anything to him, everything would turn out to be fine in the end, he just had to take care of this one little thing and things could fall back into place the way they were meant to be. Balin had said nothing, merely stayed behind with a helpless last glance as Bilbo had disappeared into the dusty corridors of their once-glorious city, the muted glow of his hair blazed into the back of his eyes like a searing brand. Days and days later, Balin had watched with a sinking weight dragging down his heart as Thorin wrapped his fingers around his beloved’s throat and dangled him off the edge of the parapets into the valley below, his face twisted into a hateful grimace, Bilbo lying deathly quiet and still under him, and thought to himself, _what have I done_.

Battle has a funny way of levelling things down until they’re all razed to the ground— kings and queens, warriors and peasants, guilty and innocent, young and old; all get caught up and tangled in the barbed wheel of fate that comes thundering down the slopes of time, with the single-minded intent of forcing the biting shards of humility and recognition of mortality into the flesh of those under it. It is a cruel, definitive process that is repeated over the ages of the world like clockwork, making piecemeal out of them lower beings, leaving behind imperative lessons of shedding old prejudices and presenting united fronts against a common enemy, as if the Valar themselves watch over the turmoil and breathe a prayer of their own, _let the next ones not repeat the mistakes of their fathers_. When friends and foe alike lay broken and bleeding at your feet, when the ground seems to squelch under your boots with the blood of the dead watering it slow and sluggishly, things like _Elves_ and _Dwarves_ and _Men_ don’t make sense anymore. The only category left is the dead and the living, the breathing and the not-breathing, the ones who remember their old allegiance and the ones who are willing to forge new ones.

Balin had dashed through the ranks of the survivors once the screeching and the roaring and the clashes of metal wheezing against thick chainmail had died down, his eyes only for his companions, for the Durins. Screaming and shouting had permeated the air in a gruesome blanket of death and agony, but Balin had hobbled along as best he could, trying to ignore the trickle of blood running into his eyes from his helm, making his way to the healing camps being set up in a heavily guarded clearing near the foot of the mountain. He’d heard snatches of laboured conversation along the way, a pair of Elves limping past talking of the Elvenking sending half his standing troops along with half of the still-standing Dwarves who’d set out to chase and strike down the remaining meagre Orc forces; a Man with an arm in a sling talked to a heavily bandaged Dwarf on how their archers were sent by Bard with the forces of Dáin and Thranduil, while their healers ran to get whatever medicinal aid they could provide from their belongings in Esgaroth. The ragged talking had placated him a very small amount, and it was only when he ran headfirst into a frazzled Oín shouting at the top of his lungs for _someone to fuckin’ get him more poultices from the Elven healers, they’re right over_ there _, why the_ fuck _is it taking so much time,_ that Balin had allowed himself to sag in relief when Oín had grabbed him by the tops of his arms and said, _it’s alright, we got him, a goddamn eagle just dropped him off, he’s over here_.

Thorin had been near incoherence the moment his dazed eyes had landed upon Balin pushing away the flaps of the tent and alighting to his side, half-rising from his prone position, as if he would have stumbled to his feet had another healer from the Iron Hills not gently pushed him back down. Stretched out on a cot, divested of his armour and his sword and his shield, his skin sallow and lifeless and his braids askew, Thorin looked so painfully _mundane_ in that instant, all signs and symbols of royalty and nobility and high birth stripped away from his broken form that it had almost moved Balin to tears. He’d been babbling at length with eyes half-lidded, caught mid-way between the waking and the sleeping, and the only clear words they could manage to make out were names. The same four names, repeated over and over, as Thorin begged and begged and _begged_ to see his nephews, his closest friend, and Bilbo, his voice cracked and rusted and grating through his shuddering throat, rising and falling with every stuttered heave of his chest. There was a massive laceration dug deep across his front, his torso already coated with a heavy layer of red, and Oín’s worry was palatable in the sickly-sweet air of the tent, scented by boiling herbs and soaked bandages and herbal brews simmering away over a small fire pit in the corner. They had locked eyes, a silent agreement passing through the distance, and in the next moment, Balin had been pushing his way out and into the crowd of the wounded and the dead, the instructions to start setting up camp already on the tip of his tongue.

He’d run into Dáin soon enough, and Balin had had to stop and gape for a moment because, really? That was _Dáin_? The last they’d seen of each other was a few decades back in the Blue Mountains along with a diplomatic envoy from the Iron Hills, but the Dwarf that stood in front of him then had been like a hero who’d stepped out of history. Tall and unyielding, standing strong even when leaning heavily onto his axe, bellowing out orders to his people with a voice that could whip entire legions into strict formation, with that same old roguish smile that cracked his impassive face in half when he caught sight of Balin in the middle of directing a few Elves to the nearest healing tent. One by one, the rest of the Company had also crossed paths with Balin as he paced the camps, calling out directions and helping to carry wounded people to the medics. A profusely bleeding Ori had been carried to an Elven tent, tucked carefully between Nori and Bifur, both of them very mindful of the two arrows sticking out his shoulder; a limping Gloín, his axes hanging tiredly at his sides, had informed him that Dori and Bofur had chosen to go along to hunt the last remaining stragglers of the Orcs. Balin had struggled to keep his composure, nodding along quietly and pointing them towards the available healers, trying his best to calm down a frantic Bofur about the whereabouts of his brother, and praying to Mahal that wherever the princes and Bilbo were, Dwalin had done his best to keep them safe.

It was when a frantic scream cut through the crushing stillness of the night air that Balin had whipped around with gut-wrenching fear to look at a huddle by the borders of their little camp; a small group of Dwarven soldiers gathered around some new wounded arrivals, and then one of them started crying out his name in a high-pitched reedy voice, and Balin had run forward, mindlessly pushing and shoving his way through the crowd. Bombur had stood there, bruised and battered beyond belief, flanked on one side by the younger of the two princes, both of them supporting a limp Fíli between them. The crown prince’s head had lolled listlessly from side to side like a marionette suspended loosely on strings, and no matter how much his brother had shaken him and pleaded for him to just talk to them, to _wake up, please, please look at me_ , his eyes hadn’t opened again. Balin hadn’t even paused to think: he’d snapped his fingers and barked out orders to get the two to the royal healing camp where Oín could look over them and for someone to head over to the Elven camps and ask to borrow their best healers for a short while. Bombur had stopped for a second to squeeze Balin’s hand lightly before he’d hurried off, Fíli tucked carefully under his broad arm. Kíli hadn’t even noticed Balin standing there, and had darted off with the two of them, his unruly hair matted with thick clumps of drying blood, Balin’s hand still stretched out for him in the swelling distance, quiet and soft and entirely too reminiscent of a childhood that seemed too long ago to be true.

There is something so terribly tiring about picking up the pieces once the battle is done and over with. The responsibility feels like a solid weight chained to your ankles, weighing you down until you’re dragging your feet along, the dull scrape of metal against hard-packed dirt grating dreadfully in your teeth. There’s always far too many dead, far too many wounded, far too many lost people to corral into a semblance of normalcy long enough to start sweeping the broken pieces of the war away from sight. You can pretend on your own for as long as needs be, act like everything is fine and dandy right up until it isn’t— and even then, you’re not allowed to break face in front of other people, because what if the cracks in your demeanour lead to an avalanche of others realising something is truly, actually, vehemently _wrong_ ; and that cannot happen, not in a war, not in the middle of a battlefield, not when death is poised to strike any straggler down at the briefest expression of weakness. So you shut up, and you soldier on, and you walk until your feet hurt and bleed and leave thick tracks of drying blood in the dirt, and you walk some more, because there’s always someone out there who needs the help, always someone out there who needs _you_ — King and commoner, living and dead, strong and weak, there’s always someone who needs you to stand by their side and breathe in time with them— so you shut up, and you soldier on, and you walk until your soul starts to bleed out of you; it doesn’t matter if it’s difficult or if it makes you feel moments away from falling over yourself, because it’s the right thing to do, so you shut up and you do it.

“You know what,” Oín started, giving Balin a critical look-over, “I’m starting to think you have a very botched perception of the way things are supposed to function around here.”

Balin huffed dryly, shaking his head lightly to try and pretend that the healer hadn’t startled him out of a rather depressing episode inside his head that had been heading steadily into a downward spiral. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said loftily, smoothing a hand down the front of his crinkled tunic. “I’m quite certain I have a rudimentary understanding of how to manage an encampment after a battle.”

Oín snorted, his great mane of grizzled grey trembling with his quiet laughter. Both of them looked over their shoulders at the other end of the tent, where Kíli lay slumped over in a chair next to his brother’s cot, their voices pitched low to not disturb their fitful sleep. “You know what I’m talking about,” the healer accused him, pointing the surgical needle in his hand right at Balin, a short length of thread still trailing from its eye. “Don’t play dumb.”

Balin did his best not to wrinkle his nose in disgust at the slightly swaying string. “I really don’t.”

“Why are you being so difficult?” Oín asked, pushing himself to his feet with a low groan, his hand braced against the edge of the cot near Thorin’s head. “You need the rest too, you know. There’s no saying about the extent of the damage you suffered with that blow. Your helm was caved in.”

Balin tilted his head forward pointedly, jabbing a finger at the thick roll of bandages wrapped firmly around his forehead with an exaggerated flourish. “I think I’ll be just fine, Oín.” He leaned back in his chair, suppressing a wince at the sharp pain that stabbed its way up his stiffening spine. “Is he going to be alright?”

“The blade must have been laced with poison, considering how sneaky those assholes can be,” Oín told him casually, pulling the thread free with the indifferent grace of a healer, and rolling it into a tiny ball between his fingers. He jerked his head once towards the resting form of their King, laid out quietly in the cot between them, his chest wrapped up tight in thick swathes of bandages. “Thank Mahal for stubborn royalty, huh? He got here on time, though, and I managed to draw out the poison. It’s going to take him a while, but he’ll live.” Here, he stopped and glared darkly at Balin, tossing the roll of leftover thread into a small bin kept in a corner. “Wrapping a cloth around your head doesn’t magically make things better, as it is.”

“It doesn’t, which is why I’m thankful I got one of the healers from the Iron Hills to look it over,” Balin answered, angling forward to take one of Thorin’s terribly cold hands in his own. He frowned at the unnatural frigidity, rubbing his own palms together quickly before enveloping his hand, trying to pass some warmth into him. “Is he supposed to be this cold?”

“Considering the fact that he almost died a few hours ago, yes.” Oín told him, leaving Thorin’s side to start puttering around in the contents of his chest at the foot of his cot. The low tinkle of vials lightly striking against each other as he rummaged around in the box followed his voice a few moments later. “He’s going to be _fine_ ; I have him here and I’m not leaving his side, alright? So breathe easy before you tip over and pass out like a lump of coals right in the middle of the road.”

“Forgive me for worrying about the fate of our _King_ , Oín,” Balin groused, now rubbing his palms so aggressively, one might have mistaken it for him trying to light a fire with flints. He raised both eyebrows, trying to impress upon his friend the importance of the next statement. “It is part of my duty as his advisor, you’d be surprised to know.”

“Oh, cut the bullshit, he’s less your King and more your son,” Oín chuckled, the normally boisterous sound a little hollow and floaty with the weight of weariness from hours of constant toil dragging upon his shoulders. He straightened up, clutching a small glass vial with a triumphant _aha_! “You’ve practically raised the line of Durin on your own after Azanulbizar, Balin. That’s no small feat.”

Balin tried his best to keep the amused and stupidly proud smile off his face. Judging by the ache in his split lip, he didn’t succeed. “Is this your way of telling me I’ve done a good job?”

Oín laughed softly, still very mindful of the sleeping forms of the two heirs tucked away together just a few paces away, like two peas in a pod. “This is my way of telling you you’re not as young as you think you are, you idiot.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Balin emphasised, letting the disgustedly resigned sound rip from deep within his chest, and brought Thorin’s hand cradled between his own to rest against his cheek with a soft but perfectly relieved smile. “Stop telling me I’m going to pass out in the middle of the road, I’m not _that_ weak.”

“No, but your knees are,” Oín said bluntly, brandishing the stoppered vial around like a sword. “What’ll be the point of holding out so long if you’ll just stumble and keel over at the coronation? Can you imagine how embarrassing that’s going to be? I might just pass away from sheer mortification.”

“You’re such a supportive bastard, aren’t you.” Balin noted crisply, rolling his eyes in mock-annoyance, and trying his best not to visualise how horrifying it would be if he actually did trip over his own feet at the coronation. No one would be cruel enough to openly laugh, of course, and he desperately hoped they’d keep their tongue when he plunged his dagger into his own heart just so he would never have to meet their eyes again. “The coronation isn’t going to happen anytime soon, so you don’t have to plan your death right away.”

“Now, now, I’m just being a wonderful friend,” Oín insisted, waggling his finger accusatorially at Balin from where he was now bent over to dig out a small mug. He chewed on the cork and tugged it free, less speaking and more slobbering around the stopper as he poured the contents of the vial into the waiting mug. “No need to be snappish just because you’re gloomy.”

Balin sighed. “I’m not being snappish.” He raised his head to glare at his friend. “Or gloomy.”

Oín didn’t even spare him a glance, busy swirling away the contents of the mug tucked carefully in the crook of his elbow. He spat out the cork into the bin, then reached for a pitcher of water placed on a low table nearby. “Sleep and rest, Balin; that’s what’ll keep you going until you can see your little dwarflings up on the throne.” He paused, and snickered softly to himself. “Mahal, Thorin would throw _such_ a fuss if he heard me say that.”

“Not just the dwarflings, but a Hobbit as well,” Balin corrected him gently, patting the back of Thorin’s blood-crusted hand. Age-old scars criss-crossed over his skin like a patchwork blanket, soaked with dirt and Orc guts, and he reached for the hem of his tunic to start wiping off the grime, choosing not to dwell on how fatherly that little action appeared to be. “If all goes well, we might just see a royal wedding in the spring.”

“Ah, yes, our very own star-crossed lovers,” Oín smiled, reaching for a mortar and pestle and settling down comfortably in the space by the foot of Thorin’s cot. Both of them worked in silence for a few moments, trying to wrap their heads around the fact that their quest was well and truly over, that they were _home_. The quiet sounds of the pestle grinding some herbs into powder filled the cloying air of the healing tent. “I cannot tell you how glad I am to know he’s found Bilbo.”

Balin sniggered. “Oh, believe me, there was no one more surprised than Thorin himself when Bilbo agreed to his proposal of courtship.” He frowned, turning his gaze downwards to where he was scrubbing the ends of his tunic over their King’s knuckles. “With the way he treated him in the beginning, I’ll be the first to admit I had serious doubts about how it could turn out. If Bilbo had refused, I don’t think any of us would have held it against him.”

“Thorin has always had trouble expressing himself in a constructive manner,” Oín shrugged lightly, still expertly continuing to wear down the herbs into a fine powder. “The Durins have suffered more than any other; we can’t blame the lad for not knowing what to do with his emotions but to vent them out as anger and frustration.” The healer paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was gruff with an underlying fury. “He didn’t have the best role models to look up to, either.”

Balin lifted his free hand, scrubbing it tiredly over his face. The lines on his skin seemed to have been etched into bone in the hours since Dáin had arrived with his army, standing tall and proud with the sunrise behind him. “I know he didn’t. The loss that was wrought upon him, the duties and responsibilities—” He shook his head, frustrated at the past, at the dead. “He was so _young_ , just a boy, and he couldn’t make some damn time for himself.” Balin took Thorin’s hand again and squeezed it softly, feeling the low thud of his pulse under his fingertips. “He had to grow up too soon.”

“But he grew up well,” Oín said with a rueful smile, abandoning his work briefly to smile at Balin’s hunched over figure. “You’ve got a big part in that.”

Balin shook his head with a low laugh. “I did what had to be done,” he told him, trying not to focus on the deep stain of red spreading languidly and calmly along the bandages wrapped around Thorin’s chest. “He’s going to make a great King.”

“He’s always been a great King, it’s just his kingdom that’s expanded,” the healer laughed fondly, his voice pitched deep and rusty and the slightest bit choked up, like he couldn’t believe they’d actually made it this far, either. The gaze he shared with Balin was meaningful and important, a quiet reaffirmation, a silent reassurance— _you’ve done well, you’ve done great, you make all of us proud of them_ ; and then he snorted again, shaking his head. “He’s also expanded his family without giving a single shit for tradition, so.”

“Ah, yes, how could we forget?” Balin hummed low in his throat, placing his King’s now clean hand back by his side with an affectionate pat. “Bilbo is going to make the most powerful Consort Erebor has ever seen.”

“ _Powerful_?” Oín repeated in disbelief, his bushy brows going high on his creased forehead. He let out a little guffaw, holding the herb-crusted end of the pestle right in Balin’s face. “He’s going to be _ruthless_ , Balin, you mark my words. You’ve raised Thorin to be polite and mannerly in his council, to treat them with respect, and that isn’t going to drain out of him anytime soon. Bilbo, on the other hand, is going to chop their fucking heads off the second any one of them try to raise their voice at the boys.”

“Okay, you really need to stop pointing things at me,” Balin grumbled, gingerly pushing the pestle out of his nose. “And you’re right; the boys have been on the meetings as observers, but we’ll have to start their active participation now. It’s not going to be pretty, not when all it’ll serve to demonstrate is that we did exactly what they refused to support us on, and they’ve got to live with that reminder for the rest of their lives.” He exhaled heavily, dropping his face into his hands. “I hope Dwalin gets back with Bilbo soon; I desperately need a hand managing things around here.”

“You spend almost a year with a fella on the road, and you start fantasising about promoting him up to King Consort.”

Balin peeked out from between his fingers. “If he manages to shut Thorin up when he’s whining about the Elves, then yes. A promotion is the least of what we all owe him.”

Oín stayed silent as he worked on finishing the task at hand. Balin, meanwhile, quietly curled his fingers around the protruding jut of Thorin’s wrist bone, and shut his eyes. His pulse thrummed at a slow, relaxed pace, a gentle reminder to the rest of them that he was alright, or he would be, anyway. It still struck Balin speechless sometimes, when he paused to think about just how much Thorin Oakenshield had truly lost in the entirety of his life. His family, his rightful throne, his kingdom, his sanity— all losses so terrible and great that they would’ve brought a lesser person to their knees, exhausted beyond belief, poised to give up on the cruel world that tried to smite them down over and over and over again. Yet, here he lay, broken and battered and still _breathing_ , stubborn as a mule and braver than any past Kings, mocking the gods themselves for making it this far, swearing to them with every single inch of his self that he would take back every last bit of happiness they stole from him, and he would live, and he would laugh, and he would be crowned in his victory'ssweet laurels, and that would be it, the end of it, the end of his tale, and this time, he would write it all on his own.

Oín hummed under his breath as he rose from the end of the cot, glancing at Balin over his shoulder when he made his way to the small stacked table in the corner. “You’re not worried about your brother, are you?”

“I have no cause to,” Balin answered him honestly, feeling the pride swell and resonate heartily inside his chest at the ringing sincerity of his own words. “Tharkûn told us that the eagle had been sent here by Dwalin and Bilbo, so I’m just waiting until they turn up.”

“Dwalin is the fiercest warrior I’ve seen in all my years,” Oín told him, grinning pleasantly at Balin as he sprinkled the powder into the small mug from before and swirled it all together. “They wouldn’t have let anything happen to each other.”

“Dwalin would rather cut off his own limb than see any harm come to Bilbo,” Balin informed him wisely, nodding in thought as he stretched out his cramped legs under him with a low grunt. Bloody old age, catching up to him.“He’s stupidly fond of the Hobbit, if it wasn’t clear enough already.”

“You can’t pin any blame on him, though. We all were rather—”

The tent flap suddenly lifted with a low rustle, the ends of the canvas dragging against each other roughly. Nori walked inside with a curt little bow to both of them, uncaring of his unannounced intrusion, and his eyes lingered a moment longer on Thorin’s slumbering form between them. He frowned lightly, the ends of his mouth turning downwards in a clear indication of unspoken fear, and the hastily stitched wound across one side of his cheek visibly pulled taut at the action, the skin stretching puffed and swollen with it. He didn’t even wince, just continued to stare down at the prone form of their King laid out so quietly and brokenly beneath them, and Balin felt a tug of sympathy in his heart for the young Dwarf before them, standing so still it was as if he didn’t know what to do with himself now that he was here.

“He’s resting,” Oín told him softly, after sharing a quick glance with Balin. “He needs quite some time to get better, but he will heal.”

Nori blinked once, twice, his eyes darting rapidly from Oín to Balin. Then, with a firm shake of his thoroughly tangled and matted hair, as if he was dispelling whatever string of morbid thoughts were racing through his mind, he straightened his back. “Dáin’s coming, and he’s got Dwalin and Bilbo with him. They’re both fit enough to walk, even though Bilbo looks like he’s going to throw up any second.”

“Future Consort or not, if he throws up in here, I’m going to make him scrub it clean himself.” Oín scowled, but there was no genuine edge to his words, and the slump in his tensed posture belied just how relieved he actually was. “I’m too old to go around on my hands and knees, and I don’t have any spare healers around right now to help me.”

“Oh, don’t fret, I’m sure Dwalin would offer his services without any prompting,” Nori chuckled under his breath, crossing his arms over his chest. “He wouldn’t dare risk making Bilbo clean anything around Thorin, sleeping or not.”

“Thank you, Nori, please show them inside,” Balin smiled, cutting Oín off in the middle of a heated rant with a hand raised half-way between them. The old healer shut his mouth with an audible clack, rolling his eyes at the cocky grin Nori threw his way. When Nori disappeared outside the tent with a last glance thrown their King’s way, Balin turned to Oín and raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“ _What_?” He demanded loudly, throwing up his hands into the air. “It’s not like I would have ever made any of my patients do that.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Balin shrugged, pushing himself to his feet with the mind to greet their arriving visitors. “I’m not questioning your work ethics.”

Oín groaned. “It’s called lightening the mood, Balin. The kid looked like he was seconds away from sobbing his fucking eyes out.”

Balin stared at him. “And the first thing that came to mind was joking about making Bilbo scrub his own vomit?”

“Come on, prissy pants, it’s not joking if it’s true,” Oín insisted, giving him the biggest shit-eating grin Balin had seen in weeks. Outside, he heard the clinking of metal and the sliding hiss of chainmail being adjusted as the soldiers hastily got into position before the approaching entourage, and he glanced askance at the healer.

“Of course Bilbo would agree, but I’m holding out hope that he’ll hurl on you instead.”

Oín gave a loud, affronted gasp. “It’s just as I feared, you’ve become even more of an asshole in your old age.”

Balin shot him a glare. “We’re of the same age, you absolute _fraud—_ ”

“Balin?”

Kíli sounded rough and scratched, the bone-deep exhaustion permeated through every little crease on his painfully young face. His hair, now firmly secured at the nape of his neck with a jagged strip of leather, was lank and lifeless as it curled limply over one shoulder. His fingers flexed absently around where they lay entwined with his brother’s, and Kíli lifted his head to stare at both of them, confusion and terror warring for dominance in his wide eyes, looking from one to the other rapidly, unblinking.

“What’s going on?” He asked, swallowing visibly around a rising cough. “Is—is Fíli alright?”

Balin opened his mouth to respond, but Oín got there first. “Of course he’s alright, he’s just asleep,” he assured the younger of the two princes, hobbling his way over to their side of the tent. He held out the mug he’d been fiddling with before with a firm smile painted on his face. “I just finished making this brew for him. You sit back, and I’ll—”

The tent flaps parted again, and Dáin Ironfoot led the way inside, followed closely by Nori. He looked as tired as he had the last time Balin had stopped to request him to send Dwalin and Bilbo along if he encountered them on his way, but he stood a little taller now. His behemoth of a battle axe stood loyally at his side, bearing his weight patiently as the Lord of the Iron Hills leaned heavily on the weapon, his hands locked in a firm grip around the handle along the shaft. His eyes were sharp and calculating as they darted once around the entire tent— the habit of a warrior, hard to unlearn— before his gaze descended upon the broken body of his cousin, covered up to his waist in blankets, his chest bound tight in bandages, the stain of fresh blood painting the whites a stark red. Dáin pressed his lips tight, and said nothing.

When Dwalin and Bilbo stepped inside, Balin tried his hardest not to sag in well-meaning relief, lest the motion be mistaken for his knees acting up again. Dwalin looked ragged and threadbare, smears of blood from countless scrapes and cuts littered across his face and neck, yet the arm he’d secured firmly around Bilbo’s shoulders was tense and rigid as he held him close to his side, wordlessly supporting all of his weight against his own. His axes were sheathed behind his back, and one of his gloves was missing. His eyes, however, softened considerably as he looked towards Balin and gave him a small nod— _I’m alright, I’m here, he needs me, so here I’ll be_ — and Balin returned it with a little smile. His chest felt so full, he feared it would burst, and a multitude of emotions would spew forth in an ugly broth. He wondered if Oín would make _him_ clean it.

“Thorin?” Bilbo said, and it was then Balin noticed that their burglar hadn’t glanced up even once from where Thorin lay on the cot, silent and deathly still, still bleeding from the poisoned wound despite Oín having stitched the laceration shut quite a while back. He took a tentative step forward, his eyes unmoving from the pale figure before him, and Dwalin let his arm fall away. “Thorin, is he— is he going to be alright?”

“He’ll be fine,” Balin reassured him, reaching out slowly but surely, giving Bilbo plenty of time to back away from the touch, but he stayed stock-still, not even stirring when he grasped his shoulder and pressed it softly. “He’s resting right now, but he will be fine, Bilbo. We had the Elven healers look him over, too.” Balin smiled at him, deliberating whether he should just throw caution to the wind and embrace the Hobbit tightly in his arms. “He’ll be back to normal soon enough, wait and see.”

“Bilbo?”

Bilbo’s head whipped around faster than Balin could follow the movement, all traces of vulnerability shuttering away from his expression. “Kíli?” He called out, hushed, as if he was afraid of shattering the silence pressing down around them.

“Bilbo,” Kíli said again, in that same cracked, chipped voice of his, like someone had reached down into his chest and dug out his soul with vicious, searching claws, leaving a grotesque trail of flaking blood and guts behind. Balin could have pinpointed the exact moment when their eyes met across the space, the sickening sweet scent of bubbling herbs and greasy poultices soaking the distance stretched taut between them. Kíli’s shoulders sagged, like the one thread that had been keeping him upright had snapped and cut him off entirely from the last reserves of strength, and he curled in on himself, the haunted and empty echo in his dreadfully young eyes digging at something horrible and resonantly mournful deep within Balin’s chest.

“ _Bilbo_ ,” Kíli choked out hoarsely, one last time, so soft and so quiet, and began to cry.

Bilbo shrugged off Balin’s lingering touch without a care and thundered across the few paces that separated Thorin and Fíli, his footsteps sure and determined, and in the next moment, his arms were wrapped firmly around Kíli with the younger prince tucked into his chest. Kíli _shuddered_ in his hold, so violently and furiously that Balin almost stepped forward himself— he didn’t think, didn’t process, just pushed forward with the intention of taking away the pain from those achingly innocent eyes _somehow_ , anyhow; but Nori caught his wrist and shook his head once, an unspoken request in his gaze, a silent _no;_ his fingers tightened once around Balin’s wrist, and he let his hand drop.

Bilbo held Kíli tight, so tight that it might have alarmed their spectators for fear of disturbing both their injuries had the younger prince not been pushing himself closer to their burglar, so frantically and so shakily, as if he was scared Bilbo would pull away from him any second and leave him behind. Bilbo’s face betrayed nothing of his thoughts or the emotions running themselves ragged inside his head; he just shifted so he could stand between Kíli’s knees and tucked his chin over his bowed head. One arm was draped roughly around his trembling shoulders, the other hand curled around the nape of his neck, and Kíli stuttered once, his breathing hitching high and strained and tremulous, before he burrowed into Bilbo’s chest and let out a low, strangled scream.

Dáin looked wounded as he watched the two of them, watched Bilbo smooth his hand in soothing, continuous motions over the prince’s hair, and he gripped the shaft of his axe tighter, as if the sight had drained him utterly until he was left a dried husk of a person, boneless and helpless to do naught but watch, silent and still, powerless and so, _so_ grateful. Dwalin and Nori had shifted closer, the younger Dwarf talking to the war general in low tones, probably inquiring about their injuries and if they needed immediate assistance. His brother shook his head once, and both of them turned as one with the same empty eyes to stare tiredly at Thorin, lost to the world in all but spirit, while Bilbo held one of his sister-sons close and stood firmly by the other, the dull gleam of his mithril shirt visible through the deep tear in his shirt.

“Hey,” Bilbo said softly, his mouth moving by Kíli’s ear, “Kíli, talk to me, please? Tell me what’s wrong. Will you let me help you?” He pulled back, just a little, just enough so he could lay his cheek atop the prince’s shivering head, his hand still stroking his hair with calm and unhurried motions. “Kíli?” He prompted.

Kíli said nothing, he could say nothing; he let out a great, heaving sob, his face still hidden in the fabric of Bilbo’s shirt, and his shoulders bowed under a fresh wave of tears.

“I’m scared too, you know,” Bilbo told him, his voice so astoundingly level and composed that Balin could do nothing but look, look in reverence and awe and all manners of sheer, unrefined gratitude. “I’m terrified out of my mind. But it’s going to be alright, I know that.”

“No, you don’t,” Kíli corrected him, raw and scraped and bloody, bent like the branch of a sapling. “You don’t know anything.”

“Of course I do, I know everything,” Bilbo said, pressing his lips to the top of the prince’s head. “Your brother and your uncle are wounded, yes, but they will be fine. They’ll heal. They just need some time to do it, that’s all.”

“Really? And who told you that? Balin, Dwalin, Oín? _Dáin_?” Kíli demanded with a rough chuckle, and he shook his head where he was still leaning against their burglar’s shoulder, as if disbelieving that Bilbo had somehow listened to what they’d told him. Balin tried not to feel too wounded by it. “Did you trust them when they did?”

“I did.” Bilbo said simply, now bringing both arms around Kíli’s shoulders and starting to rock them side to side with a slow, mindless rhythm. “I trusted them in battle to watch my back, I’m going to trust them now not to lie to me.”

“They haven’t—” Kíli paused, and hiccupped loudly, jerking beneath Bilbo’s arms. Bilbo didn’t even halt, just made a low hum and continued to sway them over and over. “They haven’t woken up, Bilbo. At first, I thought it would just be— just be Fíli who was hurt, who wasn’t waking up, wasn’t opening his eyes, but then I—”

Bilbo’s face hardened imperceptibly. “But then, you found out about Thorin,” he said, quietly.

The prince shivered in the Hobbit’s arms, the line of his back drawn harsh and quivering, and Balin noticed with a start that a small sword was still strapped to his spine, the pommel reaching just short of the curve of his shoulder. “I thought he would be here with me, but he was _here_ , and there was so much blood, it was _everywhere_ , and— and Oín said something about poison, and I just, I couldn’t—”

Bilbo’s head shot up, his eyes wild and unfocussed as he looked to a frozen Dwalin, then dragged his gaze over to where Oín stood, composedly by the foot of the King. “ _Poison_?” He said, the word barely above a splintered whisper. “There was poison on that blade?”

“I got it out of him in time, Bilbo, I promise you,” Oín told him gently, the mug still clutched loosely in his deft hands. “Thranduil sent his son and daughter, and they were of monumental help.”

“Okay,” Bilbo whispered, nodding sharply, his matted curls flopping limply on his bandaged forehead. There was a half-crazed gleam in his eyes, but he blinked once, twice, and shifted his gaze away. “Okay. Okay, thank you.”

“Bilbo,” Dwalin called out, and their burglar’s gaze shot to him instantly. Balin’s brother stepped forward, not close enough to touch but close enough to reassure him of his presence, and stretched out his hand. “Bilbo,” he said again, and smiled. “It’s alright, we’re here. I’m not going anywhere, I won’t leave you here alone.”

“I know,” Bilbo answered quickly, and exhaled, a long-drawn, shuddering sound. He reached out a hand and clutched Dwalin’s open palm in a white-knuckled grip, making a wounded noise deep inside his throat. “I know, Dwalin. Thank you.”

“I’m sorry,” Kíli grit out suddenly, his fingers convulsing in a tight flex where they were dug into the fabric around Bilbo’s waist. Balin remembered, with a hot spike of furious pity, that he was _so young_ , so innocent, still a child, for Mahal’s sake, and all they had done was toss him headfirst into a war he should never have been a part of in the first place. “Bilbo, I’m— I’m sorry, you should be with Thorin right now, and I’m—”

“No, none of that, sweetheart,” Bilbo chastised him fondly, disentangling his hand from Dwalin’s with a thankful nod and going back to smoothing the prince’s hair down. “Thorin is out like a light right now, so it wouldn’t be much use for me to scream at him when he’s not even awake, would it? I’d much rather sit here with you, if you want.”

“I’m crying all over you,” Kíli whispered with a huffy little laugh, but he still didn’t raise his head from the embrace. “Thorin would’ve been furious. I’m not exactly being very— very princely right now.”

“You go ahead and wipe your snot all over my shirt if it makes you feel better,” Bilbo said, ducking his head again to press a quick kiss to Kíli’s forehead. “If Thorin has a problem with that, he can talk to me.”

Dáin started to laugh at that, such a sudden and unforeseen sound exploding from his barrel of a chest that both Bilbo and Kíli stiffened for a second as they shifted lightly in place to look at him, Kíli still protectively cocooned in Bilbo’s arms. At the dazed and strung-out, but visibly sincere look to the Lord of the Iron Hills, however, Bilbo perceptibly melted, holding onto the younger of the two princes like his life depended upon it. He looked from one to the next, to the next and the next Dwarf, his gaze quick and evaluative, until he stopped at Dwalin and narrowed his eyes slightly, as if daring him to say anything.

Then, he began to giggle.

“You’re out of your fucking mind, aren’t you,” Dwalin said hoarsely after a long minute, watching Oín and Nori join in the hysterical laughter, their shoulders shaking with the force of that uncontrollable burst of frantic desperation, the clawing need to realise and accept that you were alive, that you made it, you actually fucking _made it_ , and that there was someone else beside you to remind you of that little fact. He looked from one to the other, jaw slack in blatant surprise. “You’re all cuckoo, that’s what.”

“What a spoilsport,” Bilbo snorted, but he sounded suspiciously teary, like he was on the verge of breaking down any moment now. He flapped a hand dismissively, making a shooing motion towards the war general. “Go now, see if you can find any ale. I have a feeling we’re all going to be needing it.”

Dwalin raised an eyebrow. “Are you giving me an order?”

“I don’t know, are you being a horrible friend and refusing my polite request?”

Nori smiled, a tight-lipped, honest smile, placing a hand on Dwalin’s elbow to shut him up. “It’s alright, Bilbo, I’m heading out anyway, I’ll see if I can arrange something.”

Bilbo returned the smile, looking so small and exhausted as he absently patted Kíli’s back, the gratitude sewn into every little edge of his form. “Thank you, Nori. Tell Ori I’m okay and that I’ll be visiting shortly, please? I don’t want him to worry.”

Nori stopped short, the back of his hand brushing the tent flap, poised mid-way in his departure. Then, he smiled ruefully, giving Bilbo a lazy salute. “I will. When Thorin wakes up, tell him from the rest of us that he’s an idiot, won’t you? I would’ve said it myself, but I don’t want my head to be the first one he chops off as King Under the Mountain. You’re a safer bet.”

“I swear it to you,” Bilbo laughed, even as Dwalin muttered something darkly under his breath and rolled his eyes. Bilbo shot him an amused look, and waved fondly at Nori’s retreating back, one hand raised in farewell. The flaps tumbled back into place with a dull rustle; for a moment, the sounds of the camp beyond filtered through to them— shouting, feet thudding past, the quiet rustle of Elven silks, low murmuring from other healing tents, the occasional distant bleating, all sounds of life, of victory, of that annoyingly stubborn Durin resolve; and Bilbo glanced back towards Balin.

“So,” he said, with a sleepy grin as Kíli hiccupped loudly against his shirt, and he brushed his hair back from his forehead. “I heard you wanted my help around this place.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, so this was 11.5k of pure and absolute bullshit, this chapter was a complete fuck-up and I'm really sorry you had to read this :(  
> your kudos and comments give me life and are the only reason I'm still posting. love you, have lots of hugs and kisses <33333
> 
> (I have no idea how these notes work, it's coming across all wonky, isn't it?)


	4. a fey melody

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thranduil’s lips twitched, as if suppressing a smile of sheer amusement. “He has a strong heart.”  
> “A fierce one,” Bard agreed, smiling to his own. He rapped his knuckles against the smooth armrest. “He stuck the Pale Orc through the throat, I’ve been told.”  
> Thranduil made a soft noise in the back of his throat, a small murmur of contemplation. “Bard,” he began, and then stopped. "Do you think we made a mistake?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I think people underestimate just how much I love Bard.)

There are days when Bard thinks he deserves an award simply for putting up with an ungodly amount of shit from the people around him, days when he thinks that even if he’d marched on that godforsaken mountain and settled down onto that fucking throne the same way everyone around him seemed to clamour and chitter and _scream_ their lungs out to do, it still wouldn’t have been compensation enough for all the times that he had been driven half-mad from the constant stress of it.

Empathy, he’d been taught by his ma, bent and exhausted and still smelling faintly of the trout they hauled in day after day, was a virtue that came only to the purest of hearts. The flaking edges of her smile had stayed stubbornly in place as she had talked to him in her sweet, lilting memory of a voice, a lullaby you’d heard an eternity ago that your bones still ached to hum in the moonlight even while they lay encased in a layer of new flesh; her fingers never pausing, never stopping, deftly and methodically sewing the tattered and rotting remnants of their fishing nets together. It was a blessing by the gods, she’d always claimed with a reverent nod of her head, to have the ability to feel everything so deeply, so profoundly, with such a singular and level-headed focus that you could reach to a weeping man and feel the salt of his tears as if they were seeping into your own parted lips. Not everyone had that gift, not everyone could recognise a flimsy veil of false cheer thrown over a haggard face that lifted and shuttered in the mocking winds, not everyone knew the weight of a lifetime you’d never even known sliding upon your shoulders from a back discreetly bowed at the waist, mere seconds away from snapping with a quiet sound and crushing a soul run ragged into oblivion— and so, it was the responsibility of the few who had that particular boon bestowed upon them by the overseers to reach out, to grasp, to save, to _hold_ , to possess enough strength in their own limbs to not let go, for the abyss below was dark and cruel, never one to be navigated alone, never with a broken heart or a broken mind, never without a lantern held in a hand that shook and shook like a leaf in ruthless autumn winds.

They had been his first failure, Bard knows that now. His father, greying beyond his years, stooped low and aching, having nothing but comforting words and steady hands every time his only son spoke in his tremulous young voice about rations running low, about winter coming faster, about the forest having iced over sooner than anyone of them could have realised, about coin and nets and supplies and clothes and fire, the same problems, year in and year out— at the heart of him, he’d stumbled and stuttered, swayed on legs as weak as a newborn colt’s, forced a shivering heart to keep pumping blood through his constricted veins, and never spoke a word of his own. They’d been called to the barge one frigid February morning, drawn out from their heads bowed together over sorting their new meagre load of haul for sale by the hollering of the wide-eyed lad who lived one street over, one of his hands clutched tight around the wooden pier while he caught his breath, the unspoken apology shining bright as day in his eyes.

Bard had run like he had never run before, his mother hot on his heels, but it had been too late. His father had been laid to rest in the small cemetery Lake-town had claimed for its own, along the low slopes beneath the broad and all-encompassing shadow of the Lonely Mountain, his face still and blank and impassive as he was lowered into the earth, amidst so many others just like him, collapsed mid-way through a life so brutal and unforgiving, it never allowed you a moment to stop and learn how to breathe again. Bard had sat there on the slope next to the mound of freshly dug earth until night fell, the hoar frost stretching out like a blanket fashioned out of glass before him, and looked towards the peak of the mountain, a shiver not from the cold dragging down his bowed curve of his spine for hours on end.

That spring, Bard had learnt that people had funny ways of dealing with loss. Some, like him, seemed to have stumbled upon a veritable casket of rage bottled up over years and years, full of hundreds of red-lettered instances of horror, or fear and terror and pain and the sheer unfairness of it all; only now, the padlock had been wrenched open and all of that fury had dissolved into the hot, pulsing warmth of their blood, a blood that still flowed, a blood that hadn’t frozen over and stopped in a sluggish crawl like it had for his father. That year, Bard had taken up the longbow and slung the quiver of arrows over his shoulder and disappeared into the forest. The dull crunch of withered leaves strewn across the forest’s floor, the low scrape of hanging branches extending like searching, bony fingers sinking their nails into the exposed flesh of his hands and face, the muted whistle of the bowstring snapping back into position by his ear, the victorious thud of his prey falling to the ground, skewered even and clean and in one single stroke— oh, Bard cherished those sounds beyond belief, beyond reason. How could he not, when, more often than not, his ears rang with the deep rumble of his father’s chuckle, radiating first from behind that bush, echoing from that copse of trees, spiralling from across that stream— always humming, always calling, but never there, never seen. He didn’t know which otherworldly creatures lived in those woods; perhaps, beings that lived forever found a wicked sort of amusement in the searing ache of mortality that they, lesser that they were, had to suffer, but he never lingered long enough to find out. Some questions, Bard had known, were best left unanswered.

His mother— his beautiful, pale, worn-out echo of a mother— had weathered on like nothing had happened, like his father had gone out with a merchant troop and would return in a few months’ time, his burlap sack slung over one false-taut shoulder, those stubborn streaks of a smile splitting his chipped face down the middle. She’d smiled still and laughed her soft laugh still, and the bags under her eyes grew deeper and darker. She’d prayed still and darned the fraying ends of their nets still, and the creases in her forehead began to be etched into the bone beneath. She’d lay curled around his father’s old coat still and sat in his favourite spot by the kitchen still, but she was slower with each passing day to wrench her eyes open and hobble over to the old stove to boil some water and toss in the few medicinal leaves Bard managed to scrounge together from the forest. No one had had to voice out that accusation for him to see it the way it was; the grim finger of fate prodding him right in his chest had clawed and tugged and ripped open the laceration in his chest, his soul, in his very _being_ — he’d failed them, both of them, and that was that. There was no two-ways about it, no deliberation or discussion, nothing. Guilt had crept up and seized him in her iron grasp, and he found himself too powerless to try and fight back, to try and _survive_.

His mother had passed away in her sleep in the middle of summer the year after they’d lost his father, and Bard hadn’t even been able to cry. There had been this weight, this heavy, unfeeling, treacherous load wrung tight around his neck, bringing him into a bow and leaving him there, stranded and alone— so, _so_ alone. She’d been put into the earth next to where his father lay; this time, the slopes were littered with a sparse, scratchy carpet of grass and weeds, slicing shallow cuts into his palms when he’d sat down in a heavy slump, feeling _something_ digging and clashing and ramming into the base of his throat. There had been a primal, animalistic sort of need, a single-minded and obsessive thought, a mindless idea to run, to rip and tear and shred, to _burn_ — but what was left anymore, the rational part of his mind had reminded him; what remained that he could salvage? His life had slipped through his lax fingers like grains of sand, carried away on a wind that bent to the will of the unfair and the unkind, and who was he, really? What could he do, but sit and stare at the way the sun set fire to the lake, the way the waters looked like golden ichor of gods and heroes past, and Bard thought to himself, _where are they now? Where are they now, when I need them the most_?

That autumn, Bard had learnt that people have funny ways of dealing with loss. Time had slipped and warped and melted until it was naught but a golden glow, then a silver haze, and the days and nights and weeks and months had run through and over and under and into each other until he couldn’t remember when he got home from the barge, when he found himself in that swaying dinghy of his, gazing down the mist and wondering what lay beyond in the realm of beings immortal and fair. His bow had almost always been nestled against the curve of his spine, a great slumbering beast ready to slither into his hand at a moment’s notice against man and monster alike, his arrows comfortably resting in a battered quiver beside them. The callouses on his hands had started to snag upon the fraying seams of his clothes; the little house, once so crowded and so vibrantly full, was now too drab and too large, too silent; the creaks of wood beneath his worn boots was now lifeless, heralding his arrival to an empty house, with a hearth that seemed to have forgotten how to dispel the chill that nestled beneath his very bones, under the layer of waxy flesh, under the stray lines of salt traced down his cheeks. Those had never lasted very long.

The forests that marked their border with the realm of the Elvenking had seemed to open to him that year, somehow, or perhaps he’d just grown more reckless; life held little value when you didn’t have anyone looking frantically out the door for your return each night you were gone. Looking back on it, the entire experience felt nothing less than a fever dream; hell, Bard wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d found himself tipped over inside the screaming riot of his own barren house, stripped of all the things that made it a home, delirious and babbling and knocking over his own feet as he stumbled around the little place, still hoping to see a head of grey bent over the slow-smoking stove, to hear a familiar thud of feet riddled with winter’s chill making their ascent to the door— but that hadn’t happened, of course; no matter how hard he’d wished, that _hadn’t_ happened. What _had_ happened was the breeze smelling just a little sweeter as she sighed her way through the reaching arms of the ancient twisted trees around them; the brooks had babbled just a little louder, high and clear enough to drown out the incessant thudding of his own ragged pulse in his ears; the deer and the birds and the rabbits had run just a little faster, crashed through the underbrush just a little swifter so he’d been forced to follow for fear of being left behind, not defenceless but _alone_. It had been a strange year, for the forest— so lifeless and full of wonders, a living, breathing marvel in itself, an emerald dropped by the gods in the midst of their rough— had always seemed to hum a melancholy tune when he packed and readied to leave. The music had never been loud or distinct enough for him to track down a singular point of origin— it had radiated, it had _glowed_ and burst forth from the earth below and the greens and the blues and the silvers around, and Bard almost always felt his lips tug into a small smile as he’d trekked his way out. He’d never strayed, never lost his way, so the forest had always been waiting to welcome him back with open arms, that fey little melody glossing sweet and syrupy over his weary tread.

Two years later, he’d met her, a lovely young woman by the name of Eva, who’d been waiting for him by the docks in a pretty blue dress— or, as pretty as you could muster in a place such as Lake-Town, anyway. Her voice had been soft, trembling slightly at the edges as she had spoken to him— she’d seen him working, Eva said quietly, and she’d heard tell that he was an unmarried man, so if he would be so willing, would he be interested in marrying her? All the time that she’d stuttered and stumbled her way through the words, visibly straining to hold his gaze, Bard had stared at a small, wilted bunch of wildflowers pressed into her hand, at a single stem of white carefully tucked behind one ear. The flowers were old, she’d probably paid good money to wrangle them off the merchant caravan that had arrived two days ago, and the idea, the very thought that someone would go to such lengths to come talk to him, _him_ — with his ratty old coat and his unkempt hair and the scruffy negligence of his beard— lord, that was a notion worth entertaining. He hadn’t even thought about it for longer than a minute, for what was there to think about? Her eyes had sparkled like the first few dreary rays of the sun glistening over the smooth, undulating waters of the lake, and she’d tasted of hope and a possibility, one that he wouldn’t have been all too willing to relinquish a hold on anytime soon.

They’d been wed a week later— one quick, razor-sharp week that felt like less of a measure of time with the sun rising and setting and more like the split second between one breath and the next— and he’d lifted her up in his arms over the threshold of his ( _their_ ) house, casting one last appraising glance over the drear, stifling aridity of it all, the sheer lack of existence, less life and more a baser compulsion of survival, the kind that’s ingrained into every living, breathing creature, not necessarily ones that _wish_ to go on that way but are compelled to by a permanent fixture rooted into their very bones. Eva’s smiles had stayed with him, long after he’d left for the barge, long after the silken warmth of her skin sliding so perfectly, so frictionless over his should have faded away, should have been seeped through and frisked off into the brisk chill of the morning mist, but they hadn’t— they had lingered there, muted and hushed, low murmurs in the back of his head, a far cry from the breathless gasps and pealing flutter of her laughter, but a consolation nonetheless. The bow had seemed sturdier in his hand, the arrows surer, somehow— and his footsteps had stopped turning towards the old forest, towards the borders that separated those ethereal, timeless beings from them lesser, grimmer, crudely hewn creatures.

The melody still drifted towards him when his dinghy stopped long enough for the promise of a big haul, but the sound had always been pale and ashen, like it had begun to bleach away in his absence, like there had been a distant presence who’d felt his breaths no longer sound within the green bars of that otherworldly prison. Bard hadn’t known, he couldn’t have known, and perhaps, the version of him that lived here, _now_ — that version had trampled down on the blossoming of the creeping tendrils of curiosity beneath his feet. He didn’t want to entertain a fancy; he _couldn’t_ , not anymore, and down that little piece of him had gone, lost somewhere in the slow swell of ripples in the lake against the wood of his vessel.

One year later, Eva had collapsed against the bed, bleeding so profusely Bard had worried if she’d pull through, if the fates that spun the threads of life and cut through strands swifter than they mortals could blink would be cruel enough to take her too, to wrench and ply her out of his unyielding hold— but then, the widow who lived downstairs had placed a small, squirming bundle in his arms with a knowing echo of a smile, and the whole world had just _stopped_. It hadn’t been a building, tremulous, declining rhythm, an orderly slowing down of the pattern in which the stars blinked and disappeared and rose back again, or even a slow exhale from the way the entirety of existence held its breath in that moment, that one singular instant when Eva had screamed so loud and so drawn out, so _pained_ — it had been jarring and abrupt and _there_ , in his face, unapologetic and rosy-cheeked and bawling at the tops of her little lungs, and Bard’s knees had almost given way, had almost folded in on themselves, had almost sent him pitching head-first into an endless, bottomless, fathomless depth, one that thrummed and resonated and _called_ to him with utter surety, with particular focus, a cry for him and him alone. Bard had stumbled next to where his wife lay, so small and so tired, her breath a faint whisper of the way her lungs swelled when she giggled, and he’d held the bundle to her, held their child, their _daughter_ to her, held her as she’d sobbed. The forest’s melody hadn’t reached his ears then, so content he was to feel the heartbeat of their wee one thud against his own, so joyous was he to feel his wife’s amused and wet chuckle into his shoulder as she slumped against him, exhausted to the bone and still so radiant, no emerald could come close to her glow in that one, timeless moment.

Two years later, Sigrid had babbled with wide-eyed, open-mouthed confusion in her father’s arms as she saw her mother toss and heave and _writhe_ , screaming so loud and shrill and piercing that the women hurrying around her had exchanged worried glances over tubs of hot water and old rags, their gnarled fingers flying at an inhuman speed to bring forth their second child into the world. Bain had been quieter than his sister had been, but no less active, no less the epitome of beauty and growth and all things bright and wonderful in the world, a dazzling fixture of light, the beacon of hope that guided Bard home from days when he found himself lost on the roiling swathes of mist curling up like columns of smoke from the unmoving surface of the lake. They’d been his anchor, the rope reeling him back from the precipice of an abyss that called to him, that had always called to him, whose unsettling thrum had never really left his ears, never stopped beating with his pulse as if keeping time with the steady pump of his heart. The pinch became tighter; the fists he had to keep clenched over the last of their coins had to smoothen out less and lesser still, for there were more mouths to feed, there was more work to do, and even if their home had started to echo with the rioting hoots of childlike laughter from him and his alike, there had always been an unhealthy pallor to Eva’s skin, and it had never faded, never drained away, like the grey shining in an ever-present tint in the waters of the lake, less a blue and more a lifeless shade.

Three winters passed, and there was something in the air then, not necessarily a blatant sinister feeling, but an uncomfortable sensation, a needling, clawing, unsettling feeling that kept raking its hideous nails down Bard’s tense back as he paced back and forth, back and forth, over and over again, Sigrid clutching one arm with a nervously puckered expression while the other looped around Bain, his little arms wrapped tightly around Bard’s neck. He should have known; lord, he should have _known_ — should have held her tighter when the women had hurried into the room, drawn by her screaming, should have pressed a kiss to her waxy brow when her breath started to stutter in her heaving chest, up and down, up and down, in a rhythmic and dull monotony. There had been no cries of pain this time around, no shrieks or howls or wretched sobs, nothing at all— just the faint, keening cry of a little girl who had been brought forth from the room and gently placed in his arms, mother-less, orphaned, alone and so, _so_ beautiful, and Bard had trembled and shook and _sobbed_ with joy and with sorrow, with an inhuman sort of emotion, his heart cleaved down the centre, the song of the forest humming in his ear to soothe the searing ache in his chest at another loss, at another creature he loved robbed from him, stolen and whisked away to a place where no mortal could follow, where _he_ could not follow, and he cried around a bubbling laugh of joy at the newborn in his arms, because people had funny ways of dealing with loss and gain when it came to them in swift succession.

The next years tumbled by faster than Tilda falling face-first down the rickety stairs leading up to their little hovel, after which he’d immediately set to work repairing that piece of shit woodwork lest any more of his children should have to suffer a twisted ankle from his negligence. Raising three children should have seemed like a daunting task, a nigh impossible mission that was, in some way or the other, doomed to fail from the start— and for the longest time, those had been fears that had plagued Bard day and night. He’d see his girls giggling as they skipped stones along the surface of the lake at dawn, Bain bundled up next to him, and think, _am I being a good father_? He’d tuck the three into the warmest out of the few threadbare blankets they could afford to have at night after regaling them with the story of the Lonely Mountain on Sigrid’s dogged insistence, and wonder, _are my children truly happy_? He’d ladle out the measly servings of fish (because it was always fucking fish, _always_ ) onto their too-empty plates with a soft smile at their cheerful exclamations, and say to himself, _would Eva have done things differently; would it have been better if I had been the one to go instead of her_?

Apprehension and terror had been his constant companions for those first few years, creeping up on him with soundless tread, curling their barbed tails around his throat until he struggled and fought and ached to _breathe_ , to draw in air, to inhale the scent of life, of his children thriving and laughing and teasing and stumbling along on knobbly knees with scraped knuckles and gap-toothed grins— Bard could have torn his chest open, and the only thing that would emerge from the dripping, scarlet mess would be the genuine, deep-bellied, content laughter of his children, _his_ Sigrid and Bain and Tilda, the only reason he still drew breath, the only reason he hadn’t slung his bow and quiver over his shoulders and disappeared to seek out the melody of the forest that now resided deep within his chest.

They’d grown up soon, too soon, far too early for him to have learnt to make peace with that particular fact. It was as if Bard just flat-out refused to see them slowly and surely grow into an effervescent youth: the way Tilda began to grow out of all her clothes sooner than he could blink, the way Bain’s voice cracked and crumbled and peeled off in a slough before he sounded disconcertingly like Bard himself, the way Sigrid quietly and smoothly took over the charge of preparing meals for all of them, with hot food always waiting on the table when Bard managed to trudge home after a rather gruelling day. It felt surreal, otherworldly, and Bard didn’t know whether to take it as a blessing or a divine reminder of his sheer inability to provide his children with the life that they truly deserved— they were growing up, and they were growing up fast, and no matter how many hours he pulled at the docks, no matter how his hands shook with the cold even in the relative warmth of their hearth, he still couldn’t manage to provide for them a life of luxury, of comfort, of an existence where they wouldn’t have to abandon hope of a presence beyond the sullen and drained shores of Lake-town— and wasn’t _that_ a thought to drive a stake into his heart as he lay awake at night, hearing the slow breathing of his children sleeping a few paces away and trying hard, _so hard_ , for the fey music to lull him to sleep yet again?

Bard has never been one to believe in the inevitability of prophecies: to him, they’re more like warnings, little symbols along the way, lighted candles at intermittent intervals that threaten the possibility of divine intervention if things did not look to be going the way the fates wanted it to. There’s nothing stoic or undulating about them, there’s nothing that cannot be warped and twisted to fit the mould of the present, for that is something not even the gods can refute— that fortune is a two-timing whore, sweet on one man in one moment, draped over the arm of another in the next. No force in the heavens or on their humble earth can contest against the indecisiveness of mortality: there can be no account nor accountability of when the tides may change, when a king might be deposed by his own flesh and blood, when long-lost warriors may be seen cresting the hill on their way back home from a journey that wrenched them away from life and living for years and years on end. And so, what good can prophecies do except to tie half-frayed, wizened old threads of an already failing hope around the bleeding hearts of the broken, and whisper to them a promise of days so far away that they would never survive to see, but urge them to hope, to reason, to _believe_ in the gold-gleam and plenty of those days to come?

For all his misgivings and annoyance at the way these tall tales and far-fetched fancies of addled minds served to placate the roiling hearts of those who were needed to rally in the present for better days in the _now_ , in the _here_ — Bard hadn’t hesitated one moment in nocking an arrow in his bow and planting himself in a position that would allow him to take out as many of his waterlogged adversaries as possible, that fateful day. He could have snorted and called them out on their bullshit there and then— merchants, his _ass_ — but they had coin to offer him, far more than his little journey to and from his decrepit little town could have warranted; nobility, then, and certainly very well loaded. Something had niggled at the back of his head, something persistent and very determined to make him turn around and threaten the motley group of Dwarves in his boat until they confessed to him the actual reason they wanted a way in; he’d seen their weapons though, and their build, and he did not wish for his children to sit waiting for a father who never came home simply because he couldn’t keep his big fat mouth shut long enough to execute a fairly simple job. And so, he’d stayed quiet, speaking only when spoken to, allowing them the dignity to huddle together in one corner of the dinghy and murmur in their sedged, stone-hewn voices, keeping a sharp eye on his surroundings as he’d rowed them along, humming that distant tune under his breath.

One of those few people had broken away from that close-knit group and approached him with soft tread and a loose posture, nothing in any line of his slight figure to counter Bard’s suddenly tensed posture, spine stiffening at the movement in his immediate line of sight. He’d looked entirely too peaceful and relaxed as he’d settled down atop an upturned barrel across from Bard, crossing his legs comfortably under him as if he’d tucked in for a nice long tale by the fire at his own hearth, if people like him did that sort of thing, Bard supposed. Despite the bristling Dwarves just a few paces away, all gnashing teeth and strong hands curled around wicked looking weapons and bulging muscles beneath their drenched tunics, the stranger had looked so at ease, with an uncharacteristic sort of elegance to his movements, all soft curves and reassuring smiles with a harmless looking sword tucked innocuously at his waist, that it had taken Bard almost an embarrassingly long amount of time to realise that he’d been so languid and loose-limbed _because_ of the assortment of guards watching his every step with a narrow-eyed, evaluative gaze. Bilbo Baggins, he’d introduced himself with a polite smile, extending a hand into the space between them, entirely too laid-back in the moment for even a man like him to worry about his safety on an otherwise regular basis, and Bard had been too surprised to do anything but lean forward and shake it, trying not to let his astonishment at the callouses seared into his otherwise smooth skin show too clearly on his face.

The longer they’d talked, the more Bard had begun to realise with a dawning sense of horror that something was just not right. After Bilbo had given him a quick rundown of the creatures that were called Hobbits— gentlefolk, really, all fussy and prim with foot-long sticks up their asses, he’d laughed grimly— Bard had switched to the next immediate question: what was _he_ doing there, then, with this company that he kept referring to with a truly disturbing sense of pride every so often, if he was one of these quiet, peaceful folk of the Green Lady herself? The Hobbit had shrugged, letting the hunched line of his shoulders drop in a noncommittal motion, and hadn’t elaborated much on that, except to subtly shift the conversation towards Bard’s children, which he realised after he’d already been babbling away for at least a quarter of an hour. A mortifying ordeal, honestly, and if his children had been around to see him ramble on and on about how wonderful they were and how proud he was of them, they’d have laughed fondly and told him to worry about his age coming up on him swifter than any one of them had realised. Bilbo, however, had merely winked at him: a teasing, ribbing sort of action, his amusement laid out bare on the line, no holds and no underhanded criticism; and it was staggering, really, just how _out there_ he was, how unafraid and inclusive and accepting, ready to chat up a complete stranger he’d met an hour ago. Bard didn’t consider himself a very friendly man— he never saw the point in wasting your time on irrational niceties with people you did business with; but here was this creature, pale and smiling, sitting so comfortably across from him like they’d been friends for years now, like he wasn’t put off in the slightest by the fact that Bard hadn’t shorn the steadily lengthening scruff of his beard in over a week now and, in all probability, resembled the exact sort of man you wouldn’t want within five yards of your children on a good, sunny day.

Their funny little _transaction_ — and Lord, wasn’t that a hilarious word he was using oh so daintily instead of calling it the illegal smuggling it rightfully was— had gone off fairly smoothly; Bard had shoved about ten barrels’ worth of fish over their heads, they’d swum up into his house through the toilet, he’d argued with their dignified asses about what constituted a proper weapon and what didn’t, and by nighttime, they’d been out of his hair. In a different world, perhaps, one where his livelihood didn’t depend upon hauling fish out of a lake that their rickety old town was built upon, Bard might have been more willfully and blissfully ignorant. In all probability, he would have smuggled them in somehow, but that would’ve been it for him— he wouldn’t have had needlessly big ears, wouldn’t have had that shameless lack of propriety as he listened in on his guests’ conversation, wouldn’t have had that little voice in the back of his mind tell him that he’d heard of _Thorin_ , this Dwarf with his glares and his flawlessly deep voice and a thundering presence large enough to fill a room with no quarters left to breathe. But no; in this world, Bard slaved away until his back ached something fierce and he spoke in huddles around the fire of elections and democracy and he occasionally dabbled in illegal businesses because his children were his life and he’d do everything in his power to keep them happy; and that was that. He’d tore through the crowd gathered around the halls of the Master, and there they were, all of them, and Bard had been filled with such an incomprehensible burst of fury that he’d emerged, shouting until his face was purple with rage, a peasant standing up bold as brass against the King under the Mountain.

The story had come tumbling back to him, skidding and sliding down rugged slopes until it slammed into his unsuspecting form staring morosely out the surface of the lake and at the solitary curve, the lonely peak of the mountain— and that was it, wasn’t it? A lost people, homeless and alone, unsheltered and unaided, who’d wandered the wilderness for decades before their dutiful son had finally cast his eyes towards home, eyes that had failed to see what fell in the shadow of his terrible mountain, the rickety old town that _he_ called home, that his _children_ called home. What was it but blind ambition, what was it but an arrogance so furious and unapologetic that it _reeked_ of indifference, of willful ignorance, of a head turned away and a conversation lead astray from tongues so trained in warfare and politics they’d forgotten how to spell out mercy and charity on their own? No right; he had _no_ right, no power, no prerogative here that he would use to rip their lives apart, shred the already fraying tatters of the hastily constructed life Bard had stitched with his own hands for his children, the life his parents had handed down to him with shaky smiles and gnarled fingers— he wouldn’t take that away from him, those memories, those faded and worn out dreams; he couldn’t. But Thorin Oakenshield had looked at him, and he’d murmured, low and sure and decisive, _I have the only right_ , and Bard knew— knew with that sinking, weighted, disappointing certainty, that he’d lost, yet again, that this was one more thing that would be torn from the breasts of his flesh and blood, because in the end, he wasn’t strong enough to protect them from the world; perhaps he had never been.

The stories hadn’t prepared him for it, because that’s the beauty of written word and spoken speech— they don’t tell you the hard parts, the harsh parts, the parts where you wish so desperately that someone else was coming for you, someone who’d be willing to actually play the saviour and not the detached spectator to their grim fate, for once. But no; Bard had trudged back home with a defeated drag of his feet, the lines of sorrow seemingly carved into his shoulders. Was it his fault? Logically, he shouldn’t have fretted over it; the Company had been a determined bunch, they wouldn’t have stopped until they got to their fucking mountain; but what if he had been an accomplice to it all, the one man who’d helped them twist the threads of fate to spell out their victory at the expense of their rotten little town? _He’d_ given them the means of travel, _he’d_ shown them the way into his house; if hellfire rained down upon them, would it be his fault? If the stench of searing flesh and the sizzle of melting bones came to replace the sweet hum of the forest’s song, would he have deserved it?

They’d come knocking the next morning, three of the Dwarves carrying the fourth between them— he was awfully young, Bard had noticed grimly, dully, as if watching in on the scene from a faraway distance— and he’d already said no, already prepared himself to make his refusal _sting_ ; but Tilda sidled up next to him, all wide-eyed with innocent horror, her naïveté practically pouring out of her slight frame, and suddenly, there was no way Bard was going to let her witness death and loss this early in life. The young prince had writhed and shivered and retched, agony writ large and scarlet for anyone to read, and they’d darted around mixing herbs and boiling soothing broths his mother had taught him, trying so frantically to hold on to him, to keep him from slipping through their grasp yet again. He’d seen the older prince— _the heir_ , he’d thought with a cruel shake of his head— grip his brother’s hand so tight and so firm he might as well have wrenched his fingers straight off, but there wasn’t time, none whatsoever to dwell on what-had-beens and what-could-be, and with a reassuring pat to his paling face, he’d helped them whip up whatever concoctions their healer commanded, the words spitting out of him rapid-fire, breathless, like he was afraid of losing another blue-blooded youth to villainy and hate.

Bard had stepped out of the house, hoping to buy some of the more sophisticated healing plants the healer had suggested from the market, the black arrow gripped in his hand while Bain dutifully jogged behind him, but there had been guards, and there had been shouts, and he had thrust the cool metal into his son’s hands, legacy being passed on from one vessel to the next, the blood of old warriors thrumming so loud it almost drowned out the fey song that lived within him— _get the hell out of here_ , he’d whispered fiercely, wanting to draw a stricken Bain into his arms but knowing they had no time, they _never_ had time; _you get the hell out of here, take it with you, and don’t look back_. When he woke, his head had been aching something terrible, and he’d been cooped up in that cramped hole of a cell, the swollen lump on the back of his head throbbing with every breath he drew in, yelling his lungs out for those fools to listen, to think, to _understand_. Not long after, there had been a thud, a ripple slicing through the still waters of the lake like a blade itching to draw blood, and Bard’s heart had stopped. _He’s here_ , he’d thought, the shiver slashing down his trembling spine like the stroke of an artisan’s brush— careful, experienced, deliberate; _he’s here, he’s coming_.

When the screaming started, when the hasty exodus began, Bard had gripped the rails of his prison and shouted himself hoarse; but what was one voice in a sea of cries, what was one man in a grave of the dead? He’d seen so much from his barred window, heard the _thud-thud-thud_ of an eldritch heart coming close and closer, felt the air shimmer and part with the monstrous flap of that winged behemoth of death— and his _children_ ; his children, what of his children? Had they left in time? Had the Dwarves managed to corral them away in time, or were they like their brethren, so hellbent on dragging everyone down into the gaping maw of inevitable death with them that they’d lost all sense of rationality and reason, of compassion and mercy? He didn’t know, he couldn’t know, and Bard had screamed and screamed and screamed some more, but so had the people he lived with, the people he grew up around, now set ablaze and crushed under the teetering corpses of their homes and impaled upon the splinters of their hand-crafted wood. But there had been a boat, piled high with gold and riches and coins, gleaming bright like a honing beacon under the fire of the drake, and it had called to him like a lighthouse in the choppy sea, like a fae creature singing to him, _for_ him, in a forest of magic and melody; there had been a rope, and soon, there had been a plan.

People spoke of legends and heroes long after death had claimed and whisked them off to lands unknown; Bard felt nothing like one, nothing like the dragon slayer they’d called him when he washed up on shore like the rest of them, soaked and shivering and terrified down to his bones. He doesn’t remember what had happened; everything blanked out, like he’d torn out the scribbled words he’d previously etched onto a piece of paper, thrown it to the flames and settled down with a new one. He remembered heat— blazing, searing, singing, melting, hell-sent heat; he remembered a body— serpentine, curled in place for a lunge, long and twisted and wrapped around the crumpled pile of what had once been homes, of what had once been life; he remembered _eyes_ — sharp, far too sharp for the living, brutal and evaluative all at once, glittering with malice and shining with hatred, burning him from the inside out when they looked at him, as if they were peeling back layer after layer of his flesh, prodding and poking at his insides, trying to see what made him _him_ , what made him dare to stand in front of the new king, the supreme authority, the one being with so much power and so much fury Bard couldn’t imagine how anyone had ever dared to dream of challenging him in the first place. He remembers Bain most vividly, remembers the beads of sweat running down his son’s forehead, the smallest of cracks in his voice as he said _it’s okay Da, it’s okay, I’m with you, I’m not scared, not anymore, not with you_ ; Bard remembers the arrow, he remembers the end.

Esgaroth had been a ruin, a desolation in every possible sense of the word; low buildings that must have once been a bustling marketplace brought down to rubble and dust, towering structures that had been watchtowers now gutted, their innards spilling out in a shower of debris and old memories. Nothing had been left intact; not the lost city with its broken spine and shattered ribs, not their stumbling people with hearts half-torn and chests half-empty, too exhausted and saddled with grief to celebrate a roof over their heads, a lay of stone beneath their weary heads. It was all he could do to direct them to take shelter in the ashen remnants of the houses, barking at them to stick together, to keep their heads down and their fires close, not that he needed to, anyway; the empty echoes had been too jarring for everyone, the feel of stone too rough for their wooden fingers. That night, Bard had stood at the battlements and looked over across the valley at the rock-hewn doors of Erebor, and prepared himself to beg for mercy one more time.

Bard knew he’d tried; how could he not, forcing himself to stand straight and speak as clearly as he could, asking for charity and benediction in a voice he struggled to keep steady, asking for help, for what kind of monster would refuse to aid them after they’d taken shelter in the now-burning skeleton of their town, eaten their bread and drank their wine, cursed them with fire raining from the skies; what kind of heathen would turn away and say no? But refusal came to them bitter and stinging, masked in words spat venomously from a traitorous mouth, and perhaps Bard had harboured some hope, some last shreds of the all-encompassing benevolence of past kings who’d sat upon thrones of gold and worn crowns that dripped with jewels; he’d left, disappointed, shattered, simmering with rage at the cruel turn of fate, at the single-mindedness of royalty. Was blood truly worth nothing before metal, did bones truly weigh nothing before rocks?

When the Elves had showed up, Bard had nearly wept with joy for it all, nearly collapsed right there on the dust and soot-laden floor at the feet of the immaculate soldiers, the muted gleam of their weapons somehow lost in the grateful radiance shimmering off each starved person’s face. The Elvenking had stood there in the middle of the stone courtyard, twin swords strapped to his belt, his armour seeming to glow with an ethereal light of its own— he’d said nothing for a long time, merely cast an inhumanly intelligent gaze upon the milling crowds that had now begun cheering and crying his name with joy; _Thranduil_ , they’d sobbed, half-delirious with disbelief and the weight of their thankfulness, _Thranduil, our saviour, Thranduil, may you live a long life!_ His face had belied nothing, not a crease of acknowledgment nor a nod of dismissal— he’d looked out ahead, his face turned to catch the reaching fingers of dawn’s rosy touch, the lines of his armour laid out smooth and silken as he stared out across the long reach of the valley. Then he’d turned, and his smile was crisp and serrated as he’d said, _come with me_ , and Bard had followed without question. The fall of his hair over his shoulder had seemed uncannily like a woven shroud, shivering and swaying softly in the wind, but his eyes— when they met his across the tumble of half-decimated stone in their path— had been piercing, dangerously so, and so Bard had swallowed his tongue and tried not to dwell too much on the Elvenking’s feral grin.

In the end, all it narrowed down to was stones made out of starlight; Bard had been naïve to think any differently. That was all it was to them high and mighty, people so ahead on their pedestals that they couldn’t even be bothered to look down at the poor and the weak grovelling at their feet, pleading, begging. Perhaps it was the way of the world, perhaps it had always been: beating hearts didn’t thunder loud enough to drown out the sensual hiss of coins grating against one another. But he’d been helpless, and more than that, he’d been filled with a treacherous sort of envy, a rage so profound it had almost blinded him; why should _he_ show mercy now, when he had the steadfast support of the son of Oropher, an immortal being stood silent as the grave and twice as hauntingly beautiful at his side? Why should _he_ be the one to show humility and compassion, when he had been thrown away so mercilessly, so cruelly, without a backward glance? It had been fury simmering within him when Bilbo Baggins had stumbled into their camp— their _siege_ , now— barely sparing any of them a cursory glance before he’d tipped a small bundle on the table around which Thranduil and Bard sat; they’d exchanged a meaningful look, and another transaction had come to pass.

Truthfully, Bard doesn’t know what he had expected to happen when they turned up at the doors of the fortress city built into the mountain, the king’s jewel glittering maliciously in his firm grip: had he, perhaps, naïve fool that he was, expected the King to take one look and be willing to trade their share for it? In his eyes, they had been nothing more than carrion birds, maudlin creatures circling the skies, waiting for their turn to hack out the guts from the still-breathing forms of warriors long struck down by the sickle of fate; it had been unbearably careless of them to assume otherwise. Maybe, some distant part of Bard’s mind had registered the absent touches the king and his burglar had shared on the road, both of them somehow gravitating towards each other no matter what the situation was, both of them standing shoulder to shoulder, as if sharing the very weight of the world between them: maybe, a small part of Bard had prayed so fervently that Bilbo would be enough, that he would be instrumental, monumental in breaking the fever of madness that had taken over the reigning monarch within the city of stone. But he’d stood at the bottom of the battlements, watching Thorin Oakenshield close his hands around his Hobbit’s throat, screaming about betrayal and treachery and forfeit claims, and he’d thought in a startling moment of clarity, _this was a mistake, this was a huge mistake_. Thranduil had shifted in his saddle atop his glorious steed, all honed edges and sinewy power beneath the silken fur, a movement so minute that none but Bard could have picked it up, but he’d known, known with that strange bone-deep certainty that came to him around the Elvenking, that they’d struck a nerve this time, and something had fallen terribly, _horribly_ out of balance.

The war came; the war won.

The screaming had been different; so, _so_ different. There was a marked change in the squealing laughter of your children as you chased them down the path to the docks, the younger ones slipping and stumbling over their feet while Sigrid kept leisurely pace at his side, rolling her eyes fondly at their antics; a man made a much stranger noise when a spear went straight through his chest. There was no hidden amusement in the battlefield, no loud ministrations and complaints when he hauled Tilda into his arms in one fell swoop and impishly tugged at Bain’s hair to draw his attention; there was only noise, a horrible, grating _noise_ that sounded like distilled hellfire, like a heart torn from a still heaving breast and pumping blood sluggishly all over your trembling hands. There was the jarring screech of metal raking across metal, the monotonous low twang of bowstrings snapping back into place, heavy war cries in languages so foreign and yet, so familiar— the heart and soul of them the same, the _sentiment_ the same, the moment the same. Everywhere he’d turned, there had only been the clashing, thundering, swelling wave of noise, unhinging a jaw and snaking up behind him to swallow him whole, and the entire time, Bard had looked around, twisted and tumbled and slashed and hacked his way through the melee, and prayed; _let me see my children one more time, god, please, let me see my children again_.

A part of him had shrivelled within his chest when he’d straightened up from the dead body of the troll, now skewered straight through the eye on his blade, only to meet the gazes of his children, his heart, his very soul incarnate stood huddled into each other under the crumbling canopy of what had once been a hall. He’d hated it, hated having to entrust upon his children duties in a war he wished they’d never had to witness; but they’d nodded earnestly, all three of them, and melted away into the shadows before his eyes. If it had been upto him, he would’ve told them to stay there, to not come out until he came to get them, but that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it— he wasn’t sure he could come back from it, not anymore. How many others had children just like his, people already having lost their homes and their legacy and their flesh and blood; how could he have turned his back on them at a time like this, at a time when staying together was far more crucial in the long run of having your own returned to you in bits and pieces, entire souls ripped out and discarded somewhere in the rubble ahead, lost forever to the ravages of time and monstrosity? How could he have wished the same loss upon any other, friend or foe, when he couldn’t bear to think of the consequences without being brought down to his knees?

Bard wondered, much later, long after the funeral pyres had begun to stutter out and the stench of rotting flesh had gotten so familiar that he couldn’t remember what the wildflowers growing by the shore of the lake had smelled like: had he been punished, somehow? Was it divine retribution, wrenching into him the agony of stumbling into the healing tents, a half-snapped arrowhead still embedded in his thigh, and having to see his children all stretched out on the cots, pale and bruised and battered beyond belief, beyond acceptance? The gods were cruel; fate herself was no delicate wench, but having Tilda knock into him, half out of her mind with sobbing harsh and delirium-laden, the sound so discordant that it tugged at something visceral deep within him: was it an otherworldly retort, a reaction that was seen fit to be crashed down upon his head, a means to discipline him, perhaps, to teach him never to think of himself among the greater people again, never to believe he could be anything but a lowly bargeman? And god, _god_ ; Bard would take all the damnation in his part without question, he would suffer any measure of penalty and chastisement without a word, if only he would never have to sit by his children’s bedsides again, holding clammy hands and praying, praying, _praying_ — for a miracle, for mercy, for benevolence, for divine intervention, for anything and everything, as long as it meant they would be safe and healthy and _alive_.

Bard ducked out of the tent, letting the coarse fabric fall back into place behind him with a dull thump. A little way off, a man he’d seen in passing down at the docks stood with a pair of heavy set Dwarves, all three of them poring intently over a roll of parchment in one of the Dwarves’ hands. They glanced up at his arrival, all three of them bowing their heads deferentially in his direction. Bard shifted a bit uneasily, shaking his head with a strained sort of smile, trying not to let his discomfort show. The Dwarves went back to the parchment, but the man— Ellis, he thought, that was what he was called— shot him a wry grin. Bard remembered, with a flash of recognition, that he’d lived in a small hut right next to the market, the first target of the fire-drake when he’d cast his monstrous gaze upon their town. He swallowed heavily, averting his gaze, and set off.

Things had changed a lot around their encampment, especially once their hunting parties had returned from cutting down the last of the stragglers. A lot more people were up and about, for one, even Sigrid— and she’d argued so fiercely with him, all flashing eyes and boiling temper; _you think you can handle everything, Da, but you can’t_ , she’d spat at him one night after they’d both ended up raising their voices at each other. Bard had staggered back a step, surprised and off-kilter with the force behind her words, and Bain had shot her a warning look from the straw cot he was sprawled out in, but Sigrid had stepped closer to him, her voice so much gentler than before; _Da, please_ , she’d said, _don’t ask me to stand by and watch you work yourself into the ground, I won’t do it_. Two days later, Sigrid had linked her fingers tightly with Tilda’s, kissed his cheek fondly, and set off to make inventories and take stock of their remaining resources. He couldn’t even fault her for it; her help had been monumental, making lists of their food supplies, secretly slipping in papers with the names of the survivors listed clearly according to injuries for first preference in safer housing situations, charging Bain to remind him to eat on time, to take the weight off his wounded leg. He didn’t deserve such wonderful children, he never had— and yet, there they were, and he would never stop being grateful for it.

Over ten days since the battle was won, and the air still buzzed with a faintly charged energy, a low thrum of electricity, like a thunderstorm stood perched on the edge, just waiting to slip in unnoticed and wreak havoc upon their makeshift shelter. Esgaroth had been reduced to ruins yet again, the few still standing buildings having lost a majority of their numbers to a mounted attack during the course of the fighting, all rubble and ash and vivid bloodstains against the pale stone. Erebor was presently off-limits, not only because Gandalf had thundered his way through the fray and yelled in a voice crackling with power, “If any fool here wishes to follow me into that sickness-infested city before I permit you to, know that you have earned my scorn even in death”— which was, in all probability, said more for the dramatics than for the truth of it— but also because their royalty were all presently indisposed. A few of his people had clamoured, hateful and far too loud, crowding around the Dwarven healing tent and asking why they couldn’t be allowed to enter the fortress city; surely, after all this mess, the arrogance of the King wouldn’t extend to refusing shelter for the weary and the homeless, _again_? But Bilbo Baggins had emerged, slight but _glowing_ with the sort of self-assured power Bard wished he could assert, with the Lord of the Iron Hills at his side— Ironfoot, he was called— and said, in no uncertain terms, that the city had housed a dragon for decades. Even if they discarded the very real worries of all of them about the sickness infiltrating the minds of starving and desperate people ( _people like us, then?_ One of them had demanded, harsh and crude, and Bilbo had nodded; _yes, people like us,_ all _of us_ ), there was still the question of structural integrity. Bilbo had held up his hands, placating and calm in a clear sign of surrender of authority, reminding the people that _they_ held the power, that _they_ were the ones they lived to serve— and he’d smiled and said, _no_ , no, _you can’t go into Erebor, not without our permission, not yet;_ and there was some grumbling and some more pretty words, and that was that.

Tensions in the camp hadn’t simmered down. Bard had often been called to resolve minor skirmishes, tempers boiling down and cascading down in a sizzling display of snarling words and enraged shoves, but he supposed that was to be expected. They had no clear plan, no ideas about the future whatsoever except trying to live out a harsh winter on whatever meagre rations they could scrounge together. The Elves had no obligation to be here, they could pack up and leave at any moment; the Dwarves would have a little more problem with arranging for food and water, but they had shelter and numbers that mattered far more than anything else. The Men had nothing to their name, no food or shelter, no means of survival, nothing— except whatever scraps of charity the Kings would throw their way. Would little pieces and discarded morsels of royal dinners be enough to sustain a starving population?

Bard tried not to let his limp be too prominent as he half-staggered his way towards the massive tent erected a little off to the side from the central pathway; the thread of the stitches pulled a little too tight sometimes, and in the night, the skin around the suture was swollen and shiny. He nodded politely at the two Elven guards stationed at the entrance, his eyes roving over the stern postures of the two others a little way off. They didn’t react, merely lifted the ends of the rich green silk and lifted it, and Bard limped inside with an appreciative hum.

“Your Majesty,” Bard immediately said, dipping his head and angling his shoulders into a shallow bow. “I am glad to see you well.”

“And I, you.” Thranduil responded smoothly, tilting his fair head gracefully at Bard, who still hovered a little awkwardly at the doorway. He swept out a hand, gesturing largely towards the empty hard-backed chairs arranged neatly around the familiar length of the table. “Make yourself comfortable; our guests will be here in a while.” He drummed his impossibly pale fingers upon the edge of the carved wood, letting out a little hum under his breath. “Wine?”

“No, thank you, I’m alright,” Bard told him, shaking his head as he half-limped, half-stumbled forward towards the chair at his immediate left. The chair was smooth, quite strangely carved, and he groaned in relief when his spine fit right into the sensual curve of the wood, his hands instantly coming up to curl around the armrests. “Oh, _wow,_ ” he wheezed, sinking into the royal seat and trying not to imagine which ruler had sat in the same place last.

Thranduil’s mouth tipped up at one corner, even though his expression belied little of the amusement that glittered mirthfully in his eyes. “I see you like it,” he observed stoically, reaching out for an intricately carved goblet set off to his side, the low drape of his sleeve sliding silently against the wood.

“Yeah, no shit,” Bard laughed a little breathlessly, letting his head drop back with a low thud against the back of the chair, his eyes slipping shut. He felt, rather than heard, the Elvenking’s bemused chuckle thrumming through his relaxed form, and cracked one eye open to look at him, swivelling his head to the side. “Something amuse you, my grace?”

“No, nothing,” Thranduil said quietly, his voice still faintly ringing with the unspoken hilarity, and waved a hand noncommittally in the space between them. His eyes softened considerably, and he cocked his head to the side, as if listening for something. “Nothing at all,” he said again, with a curious little smile.

Bard shrugged and let his head roll back straight, his eyes trained on the smooth cover of the tent. He could hear the sounds of people talking outside, arguing, chattering, laughing in dull tones; there was the thudding of feet against the hard-packed earth, messengers and healers and helpers still darting around with supplies and herbs, lord bless them; fires crackled and sheathed weapons shifted on belts and cautious conversations filtered in. Somewhere, far away, someone walked into a copse of trees and sang a song of the skies above and the waters below.

“How are your children?” Thranduil asked him, and Bard kept staring ahead, now too comfortable to want to shift his entire posture to accommodate him in his vision.

“Bain’s still got that broken leg, but they’re good,” he said, feeling the depth of that gratitude seep into him until he positively shivered with it. They were alive, they were alright; his children, they were _safe_. “Sigrid gets a headache when she’s been working too long, and Tilda wakes up screaming sometimes. But, they’re alright.”

“The nightmares don’t fade away.” Thranduil told him solemnly, his voice ringing with the wisdom of a hundred ages past. “As much as I hate to say it, she will learn to live with them one day.”

“As do we all,” Bard said.

The frigid wind whipped over the tent; the braziers spluttered for a long moment. Finally, Thranduil spoke. “Your children are blessed to have you as a father, Bard. Do not forget that.”

Bard let out a bitter laugh, screwing his eyes shut in sheer annoyance. “A father who dragged them into a war they should never have seen in the first place,” he spat, feeling the acrid sting of rage in his mouth. “Yes, I’m sure they count themselves as the luckiest children in the world.”

“The war was not your fault.”

“No. No, it wasn’t,” Bard agreed, exhaling so harshly he could feel the air raking its way out of his lungs and past his gritted teeth. “But it still happened, and I could not protect them.”

Silence fell. Bard sat in his luxurious chair, feeling more and more like a complete idiot with each passing second for having vomited his fury in front of Thranduil in a twisting, bubbling broth of pure hatred. What business did the Elvenking have with what he did, what he thought, what he _felt_? Hell, just because they’d fought side by side during the battle, Bard had been enough of a pigheaded fool to go ahead and think he might consider them friends. An immortal being made no friends; an immortal being did not grace lowly mortals like him with their presence, with their blinding, dazzling radiance.

Bard watched a ripple run through the silken roof of the tent. “How are your children?” He finally managed to croak through a throat that felt like he’d swallowed wool, trying to hide his wince as he shifted.

To the side, Thranduil let out a sigh that might have passed off as resigned to anyone else, but to a father of three sounded very much like a sound of veiled comfort and relief. “They’re both doing quite well, actually. My elder has taken over the charge of the guards and what’s left of our forces here. She’s been managing the coordination with the Dwarven reserves, mostly talks with the Lord of the Iron Hills.” Bard tipped his head in his direction, only to watch Thranduil take a deeply pointed swig from his goblet. “Honestly, I do not envy her.”

“Your younger is the heir, right?” Bard asked, frowning in thought.

“Legolas, yes, he’s the crown prince,” Thranduil nodded with that air of polished and refined pride that parents adopted whenever they tried to nonchalantly pass off their children’s achievements as minor remarks, as trivial as the weather and twice as certain. “Tauriel has made it very clear that she has absolutely no interest in ruling a kingdom; her calling, apparently, is standing by her brother and rooting out all evil to the best of her capabilities.” Thranduil raised his eyebrows meaningfully, as if silently begging Bard to understand. “Her words, not mine.”

Bard didn’t even bother to smother his laugh at the petulant expression on the Elvenking’s striking face. “Are you sure you got it correct?”

Thranduil scowled into the distance, as if reminiscing the memory of the day it happened. “That was the gist of it. I don’t remember her exact words; all I can recall is that Legolas and his sister started shouting at each other so loudly that none of us could finish our dinner.”

“Really?” Bard asked curiously, leaning forward in his chair to stare at him. “I would’ve thought they would have learnt to communicate properly by now.”

Thranduil rolled his eyes so hard that if Bard had caught one of his children doing it, he would’ve already told them seven different tales of rowdy children from the old town who’d rolled their eyes so much they’d gotten stuck with that cross-eyed expression for life. “All these millennia, and they still scream at each other loud enough to bring the walls down,” he grumbled, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s a wonder they’re both so well-versed in healing. I wouldn’t have believed their patience if I hadn’t seen it in play with my own eyes.”

“I don’t blame Tauriel for her choice,” Bard shrugged, rolling his shoulders with a satisfied grunt. He settled back into the warm embrace of the chair, meeting the piercing eyes of the Elvenking with a listless gesture. “I don’t have anyone I could pass on the mantle of the rule to. I still wouldn’t wish it upon anyone; it’s a hard business.”

Thranduil frowned. “Is that what you think of it?”

Bard sighed, shifting in place so he could hold the Elvenking’s assessing gaze. “ _Is_ there any other way I could think of it? I’m a _bargeman_ , not a king.”

The lines etched into Thranduil’s face deepened. He had such an oddly symmetrical face, Bard silently wondered to himself, trying not to twitch uneasily in his seat; if he were any sort of poetic, he’d go ahead and call it ethereal, otherworldly, _breathtaking_. “You’re the dragon slayer,” he insisted, leaning forward from his lax curl against his own ornate chair. “History will not forget you, son of Girion; I can assure you of that.”

“I had the weight of a noble bloodline thrust upon me, and it came with its own poisons,” Bard told him, his mouth curled around a sullen smile. “I do not want my children to be saddled with the same burden as well.”

Thranduil’s voice was hushed as he spoke next, so soft it was barely above a whisper, like a voice calling out something from a great distance, lost to the wind if you hadn’t already had your attention captured by the pale gold of his hair swaying enchantingly in the current. “What you will leave them with is not a burden, Bard the Bowman,” he said quietly, and there was something in his tone, something pleading and forceful, that Bard looked up to meet his eyes.

Thranduil smiled, slow and sincere, so infused with a faraway tranquility and a hazy grace that it was almost unsettling in its proximity, like searching for a glimpse of the sun behind thick swathes of grey clouds, raring for just one look, just _one_ glimmer of that heavenly light. “You give them your love and your strength; _that_ will be their birthright. No nobler legacy was ever passed on. Do not ask your children to carry the bones of the dead as you have; they will need the firmness of their spines to bring our lands to a better future.”

Bard stared at him. Thranduil didn’t push any further; he reclined back in his place at the head of the table and lifted the goblet to his lips, silently raising it in his direction in a wordless toast. Bard’s head jerked absently in a nod of acknowledgment, and the Elvenking’s head dipped down to take a measured swallow from his cup, his marble-carved fingers curled firmly and assertively around the base of the bronze chalice. There was something in the wine, Bard noticed with a lazy jolt of recognition, something that swirled like liquid silver, a beverage which cast a hypnotic play of light across Thranduil’s features, making it look like he was cut from glass, all reflective edges and endless depths, slow and weighted in equal measures, a being who walked through time like he drifted through the waters of rivers and brooks in a forest far away.

Another sharp gust of wind snarled its way through the tent, gnashing teeth and killer clawed. A brazier by the entrance coughed out a spray of cinders and thin wisps of smoke; the light caught off one of the heavy rings resting upon his fingers in a dazzling flash of white. Bard blinked.

“You think he should be here?” He asked instead.

Thranduil exhaled, heavy and withered, like something was stuck in his airway and stopping him rather cruelly from taking in a breath. “No, I don’t think so. He needs the rest. Not even his stubborn resolve will be able to coast him over an injury this brutal.”

“But he will.”

Thranduil nodded, and lifted the goblet to his lips again. “Yes, he will.”

Bard let the air in his lungs scuttle out of him in a disbelieving groan, dropping his chin onto his palm. His elbow dug into the carved motif of a flowering vine cut along the polished wood. “His chest was caved in, wasn’t it.”

“The Defiler had poison on the blade as well,” Thranduil told him coolly, nodding shortly when Bard goggled openly in his direction. “Even with the help my children gave, it is nothing short of a miracle that he’s still alive.” He swallowed, the pale column of his throat shifting with the movement; Bard tried not to stutter. Thranduil’s lips twitched, as if suppressing a smile of sheer amusement. “He has a strong heart.”

“A fierce one,” Bard agreed, smiling to his own. He rapped his knuckles against the smooth armrest. “He stuck the Pale Orc through the throat, I’ve been told.”

Thranduil made a soft noise in the back of his throat, a small murmur of contemplation. “Bard,” he began, and then stopped, as if chewing out the words before sounding them out, hashing his thoughts out quietly to himself before sinking back in his chair in an undignified slump with a desperate sort of huff. “Do you think we made a mistake?”

Bard tapped the toe of his boot against the carpet laid out beneath them; it was a fine thing, all thick weaves of maroon and copper in swirling, intricate patterns— definitely far too regal for him to try and wipe the mud off on. He stretched out his legs, crossing them at the ankles, and turned to look at the Elvenking. “I don’t think there is any way we could have stopped the war,” he said, mapping out the slowly appearing creases on Thranduil’s forehead in his mind. “The Orcs were out for blood; they would’ve hunted us down individually, had we not provided a common front. Our losses would have been far greater, then.”

Thranduil shook his head. “You know that isn’t what I asked.”

“I don’t know,” Bard told him, honest and blunt; what point was left in beating around the bush, anyway? “I don’t know if I could have ever forgiven myself, had Thorin done something, _anything_ to harm Bilbo. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”

“His actions were not his own,” Thranduil said softly. His hair positively _flowed_ down his chest, like a cascade of molten gold, precious and pure— and so dreadfully distracting. “The madness affected us, too; all who were within reach of it.”

“We were compelled, all of us.” Bard said, tearing his eyes away to face him straight. “There is much to plead forgiveness for, but it will come swift.” He reached out suddenly on a mindless whim, as if struck by a primal, visceral impulse; Bard laid his hand atop the Elvenking’s wrist, and let his fingers press slightly into the cool, cool flesh. “Even for old wounds.”

Thranduil looked down at where their hands touched; his eyes, when they met, were surprised, and faintly bemused, like this was a minor outcome he hadn’t expected in the grand scheme of things. He shifted his hand slightly, tugging it towards himself, so that Bard’s fingers now clasped gently around his own, and smiled ruefully. “You really should—”

The tent flaps parted, and Thranduil’s hand disappeared. Bard never even saw it moving; one moment it was there, the next it was placed lightly next to his now empty goblet, his index finger idly tracing the patterns etched into the metal. A guard peered in, his tawny hair swinging slightly at his respectful bow. “Your Majesty,” he said, polite and resolute. “The King under the Mountain and Master Baggins are here to see you.”

“See them in, thank you,” Thranduil nodded, absently tucking a lock of hair behind one pointed ear; Bard tried not to stare in rapt fascination. “I might have need of some more pitchers of wine.”

“Of course, my king,” the guard agreed, and ducked out of sight.

Thranduil gave him a raw grin, but it seemed off-kilter, half-strength, an odd amalgamation of resignation and distant melancholy. “Let’s see about those old wounds, shall we,” he said, and rose to his feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was supposed to include an interaction between bard, thranduil, bilbo and thorin, but since I touched 13k on this alone, I decided to split the chapter. I hope you're all doing well; my life has been uncomfortably busy this last month, but I'm doing my best, really. take care! come talk to me on twitter and Tumblr! the links should be here (still don't know how the notes work) but they're in my profile, so come say hi!


	5. durin blue, elven silver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bilbo’s lip curved into a hateful little sneer, mirth and rage and disgust all warring for dominance upon the shadowed angles of his face. He leaned forward in his chair, testily, harshly, angrily; the expression he wore was terrible, in every possible sense of the word. “The rightful King Under the Mountain himself was birthed from the throes of adversity. Give him some leeway, Thorin. He happens to be your own flesh and blood.”  
> “That was a necessity.” Oakenshield bit back instantly, the heavy rings on his fingers glittering as his hands made an aborted movement, like he’d slam them on the table if only he wasn’t wary of what Bilbo would say if he did. “I did not choose to have the crown passed on to me that early.”  
> Bilbo leered at him, all teeth, all fury. “And you think he did?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is 13.2k words long, and you'll finally see some progression of the consort bilbo baggins tag. it'll take a while. sit back, and have fun.

Thranduil often wondered, at what point does man stop being man, and cross over the boundary into the unspeakable, into the irredeemable?

_Keen ears and keener eyes_ , his mother used to laugh, combing her spindle thin fingers through his hair, ivory on gold, bleached and pale, seemingly bloodless; a dead woman walking. To a lesser trained view, it might have seemed that she was cold, shockingly so; that if you walked close enough, you’d feel the tantalising chill of the lake’s frozen surface thrumming in the meagre space between your rough tunic and the glossy silks of her robes, that if you accidentally touched her hands when she reached out for you, dream-like, spectre-like, they’d be nothing less than shards of the coldest ice, quick to cut and quicker to bleed. She could draw blood if she looked at you long enough; everyone knew that part of the tale.

They’d called her a witch in under-the-breath whispers and over-the-shoulder speculations, the Elf whose limbs were torn from weeping clouds, the woman whose hair was knit from the still pulsing blood of screaming beasts, opposing elements mingling in her veins that still thrashed and still ached and hurt her so much that she’d taken to walking in the woods late at night. It had always made her laugh, and her voice used to echo in the carved chambers long after she’d gone, long after he was the only one left, hearing it strike from wall to wall, rushing back to him in sweeping tumults of invisible silver and darting fishes, hopping, skipping, jumping. She’d wait for him at the foot of the stairs arching up to his halls, a knowing smile playing at the corners of her blood-bereft lips, and he’d know she had heard him listening to the way their laughter swam together, streaking and gushing and thundering and raging, like it was potent enough to raise forests, like it was powerful enough to make the walls of the castle come crashing down. Her smile could wage wars, his father used to say with a fond and teasing smile, but he knew better now. It couldn’t just wage a war; it had ended one.

_Are you a witch?_ Thranduil remembers asking her once, words tripping over each other, his tongue fumbling in his mouth like roughened sand grating against the soles of his feet as he’d hurried to keep pace with her while she walked through the forest, one corner of her robes clutched in his small fist, a grounding anchor, a tether to keep him in the here and the now. He’d used to think of it as nothing less than the greatest wonder, the way she swept through the trees and the bushes and the foliage without one backwards glance; her skirts never snagged, her feet never stumbled, her elbows never caught on branches reaching out with clawing hands to rip her garb to tatters. She’d slowed down to keep pace with him, her ember-red hair seeming to glow whenever it caught on a stray beam of sunlight shredding its way through the enclosing canopy of green and gold, and her hand had encircled his wrist. He’d known she was mapping out the fragile bones in his arm, quietly mulling over the delicacy of naïveté and youth, silently turning over distant notions and present fancies over and over in the recesses of her mind, inexplicable, ethereal, so different from him and his. Yet, he’d asked her again, leaning forward in his anticipation, “Are you a witch?”

She’d stopped, turned in place to look at him. Her eyes were set in their sockets like stars thrust into a simple potter’s urn, gleaming and winking dully in a limited expanse of the night, promising a lifetime of wisdom if only you dared to come close enough. Would he have tried to reach in, see if he could touch them, just to know if they burned as hot and furious as they told him?

“Are you afraid, Thranduil?” She had asked him instead, soft and supple; it had reminded him of young shoots swaying in the summer winds, of the sinuous slide of a blade retreating into its veritable prison on the waist of its master, of folk tales once engraved onto waggling tongues but now left lost and bleeding somewhere along the dusty tomes of days gone by. Her palm was cool against his own, lines of life and joy and sorrow and health cutting across the unblemished skin, leaving behind a mysterious trail of its own. “Do you believe in it?”

He’d looked around at the forest, curiously taking in every little detail. It had been overwhelming to stand within an ever-expanding cocoon, to know you’d planted your feet in the midst of the epitome of vitality of their kingdom. This was to be the jewel in his dower, the second crown that would fall upon his head one day, one made of twisting wood and poisonous berries and the sickly sweet scent of primrose and stargazer and freesia, woven into his hair like a braid, an extension of himself, a set of manacles to keep his thoughts from flying too far and too free. The trees had stretched and creaked and hummed far, far above his head, singing the opening strains of a song only his mother could hear; a chorus of otherworldly murmurs and fey melodies for the Elf who’d walked the lands of the dead and come back with a piece of her soul ripped out of her chest. Verdure had dripped from each bough, thick and heavy and sloughing off in a softly bubbling concoction of madness on the forest floor; the grass had crunched beneath his shoes, and the answer had always been on the tip of his tongue.

“Yes,” he’d said. _Yes_ , and that was it.

Keen ears and keener eyes. He’d always been observant, whip-smart, hawk-eyed, silver-tongued; fire-hearted, ice-hearted. Nothing slipped past him because he never allowed himself to stay lax long enough for that to happen. Saying he’d been raised for the throne sounded crude even to his ears, like a pig to the slaughter, a horse for the battlefield, but was there any other way to put it? There’s a certain type of people who have strength enough to ascend the stairs to that pedestal; it’s a might that’s beat into existence. Bards and poets can sing of unlikely heroes and vengeful warrior-kings and long-due homecomings all they want, but the truth of the matter is simple, because it has always been that simple. You need a precise strain of willingness to disconnect from humanity to sit upon that throne and not let your back bow under the weight of the dead looming above you. That strain is whipped into being until your flesh carries lash marks for all of eternity, cheerful reminders of what you’ve done to get up there, what you’ve been told you deserve, where you’ve been told you _belong_. Thranduil has lived millennia; his marks just seem to become deeper and more potent over time.

It’s been difficult to label himself according to terms dictated by one other than his own self, difficult to figure out which parts of his being corresponded to one or the other distinct demarcations of right or wrong. After all, who’s to say what’s right and wrong? The fallacy of morality and mortality in men seems laughably elementary, painfully pathetic; black and white, left and right, one and two. You kill a man when you have much and call it a sin; you kill a man when you have little and call it an act of desperation. You have much and lust for more, your priests call it greed; you have little and hunger for more, your friends call it ambition. You hold a heart in the palm of your hand, the lover cries indifference; you place your heart in the palm of his hand, the lover cries dissatisfaction. You paint yourself in black and white and say you’re seeing grey; you stand in a sea of bleached bone-ash and say you’re drenched in red. Black and white, left and right, one and two, blood and bone; right and wrong.

Parameters change when you’ve lived long enough to see the flesh flake off the bone of those you once loved and flutter away in the arms of frivolous winds. Ignorance might compel lesser people to look at it as a boon, a blessing from the heavens, a moment of complete and utter bliss where the Valar smiled over their beloved children, those they trailed spidery fingers over in star-soaked glitter and breathed the essence of the very universe into. But when you’ve lived day in and day out, never sick, never waning, always stuck in that dreadfully serene plane of an undulating existence, that rolling land where all goes well and nothing ever goes wrong— you start seeing it somewhat differently. There’s only so long one could stare at the sun sinking into the waiting embrace of his lover along the endless horizon and not beg for hellfire to rain upon them, to dream of the skies collapsing inwards and spilling out harshly lettered demons from the bowels of a separate reality. There’s only so long one could look at rose petals and whites and golds and greens and not ache with the desire to remember what ochres and reds and purples and crimsons appear as. There’s only so long he could live in a prison of inaction and monotony, and not feel his very soul sob for the heady rush of things yet unknown.

Because that’s the thing about him; Thranduil _craved_ chaos. He dreamed of it, he lusted after it, he was a remorseless glutton for it. Each deadly sin you could wrap him in and shroud him under for it, he’d be willing. He’d lay down and take that chaos and let it slam over him in a tearing, slashing, howling, guzzling crescendo of disarray and disorientation. He wanted it; he _needed_ it. He wanted to take that unpredictability and sew it into the sinews that trapped the tattered fragments of his soul together; he wanted to grab that indecision and carve it into the hollows of his empty, empty chest. He’d drain the last drops of his metallic blood and pour it into a golden chalice; he’d tear out cuts of meat from his calves and his sides for his enemies to feast on, if only he could keep that consuming, smothering, _swallowing_ feel of tumult bubbling slow and hot and simmering inside of him.

Bred, he called himself. Created; formed; fashioned; crafted; _hewn_. Who he once was mattered nothing to the creature he was today. It scared Thranduil, because on some days, days when he walked through glades and crossed rivers and stumbled over rotting logs, he couldn’t remember; couldn’t remember if it had hurt when they’d ripped him apart, turned him inside-out, spun him around and around and around on an axis he never knew existed until he didn’t know which way was up and which was down anymore. Every part of him that had made him _him_ , they’d taken away. Tore it away; left him hunched over, choking on his own blood, feeling his lungs stutter and wheeze and _sob_ in his gut, his entrails falling through the gaps in his shaking hands. And what was left in the wreckage, keening quietly in the flesh that still clung to him like skin, even when his own had sloughed off and fallen away? A prince, royalty; blue blood. A leader, a warrior; a commander of forces. A protector of the common folk, the lesser folk. A _king_.

He’d lost everything to them, to their gaping mouths and gnashing teeth and those hungry, hungry tongues. First his mother, slain by an arrow clean through the throat, her mouth caught open in surprise even in death; he hadn’t had time to weep for her, for the end of a battle did not mean the end of a fight. His father, Oropher the brave, Oropher the wise, Oropher the beautiful, Oropher the kind even when he lay gasping for breath, leaving bloody handprints all over Thranduil’s armour; he hadn’t wept for him, either, for there hadn’t been any time. His warriors, time and time again, over and over again, people who’d bowed to him and knelt before him and blessed his name to the heavens when he’d passed them in his halls and thrown themselves in front of him without a second thought; he hadn’t wept for them, for he had to care for the ones that were left. His wife, his name forever woven in a stifled scream, hands that had held his own and soothed away nightmares from the furrowed brows of their children extended towards him in a plea for help, a last attempt at trying to move his faithless heart; he hadn’t wept for her, perhaps it was well enough that there was no grave.

The stoicism of self terrified him, choked him, made him taste blood. Was it him, the boy who was shredded to death upon blades of strength and destiny until the only thing left of him was his cold, calculating mind? Had he forgotten what mercy and kindness and charity felt like, so absorbed was he in his ministrations of justice and expansions and military aggrandisements? His anger, his cruelty, the frigidity of his heart— these were all an integral part of him, something which made him a good king, someone who was willing to go to any lengths to keep his power and his kingdom from falling into shambles. But was it all truly worth it? Was this facade imperative even when his own children strapped on their armour and marched into battle, when he had to stand to the side and watch them leave with his heart in his mouth and his crown in his hands? Was it heartless of him to have realised so late, when it came to his own flesh and blood, when he’d already laid to rest the children of so many others, to protect him and his own?

The low exchange of gruff conversation just beyond the bounds of their tent snapped Thranduil back to the present. Bard raised a brow at him, looking for all the world like he’d swap his left hand for the chance to know what it was that had had him caught up in the throes of an age-old recollection, but Thranduil just shook his head. There were far more important things at hand. Their fun little chat could wait.

Thranduil’s guards stepped in with impassive faces and unwavering gazes to move the ends of the silk to the sides, their movements politely measured and tempered to perfection as they shifted to opposing ends, holding the flaps open for the incoming party. Two Dwarven guards led the way in with the chiming clink of metal against armour, massive and brutal and grizzled, hulking in a way that spoke of battle experience, vigilant in a way that betrayed they knew of the gravity of their king’s sickness. The flickering flames from the braziers licked at the wickedly sharp edges of their axes, hands curved protectively over the honed blades, the coiled strength in their frames belying a split-second decision to spring into action at the smallest signs of conflict. Thranduil tried not to look too impressed; it was rather hard to form that sort of deep-rooted attachment to a monarch beyond the sheer boundaries of duty and honour, a bond that transcended the meagre opportunities of employment and status. A personal investment in the well-being of him and his was certainly, without a doubt, quite intriguing.

Thranduil didn’t know what he had expected to see of the Dwarven king from legend, the man who had tales sung of the valour in his heart and the strength in his arms, the dutiful son who had reclaimed his homeland from the claws of a behemoth of the serpent, laying his own life on the line in the process with a clear motive of this being the final and most important responsibility of his inheritance. They’d had their differences, the Elvenking and the Dwarven king, but Thranduil’s grievances had fallen a little too sharply upon Thrór’s grandson. Perhaps there was a small part inside of him that wanted to see his insurmountable presence brought down low, to see him frail and broken and battered beyond compare, to have witnessed for himself how even the most powerful of mountains could come crashing to the ground. Perhaps there was a small corner inside of him that wished to see him tired, finally showing some cracks, finally showing some strains, finally looking like he was struggling to breathe under the weight of all that guilt, all that horror, all that loss that Thranduil himself struggled with, tasting blood whenever he drank his wine and chewing on flesh whenever he ate his stew. Perhaps there was something in him that wanted to see the King Under the Mountain as nothing more than just a king, nothing more than made of the same ice that Thranduil was. Perhaps he just wanted to see him as human, not the god of rage and fire his people called him to be.

Whatever he’d been silently turning over in his mind, the Dwarven king didn’t comply with a single one of those demands. Thorin Oakenshield had one of his arms slung around a warrior who was, if not taller, easily as built and fierce-looking as him; the second one, he had wrapped around the shoulders of Bilbo Baggins, who looked up as soon as they entered and shot Bard a wide, wide grin. Thranduil blinked in surprise, a little thrown by this development, turning his head to look at him, but Bard was already lifting a hand to wave cheerily at him. Oakenshield let out a low grunt of pain as he was jostled by the blatantly mismatched steps of his two companions, and Bilbo immediately lifted his free hand to press very lightly against his midsection, both a steadying touch and a point of comfort through the haze of the injury. Bard turned his head away swiftly when Oakenshield leaned down to speak something in Bilbo’s ear, his lips brushing against the copper riddled curls of his hair; the moment, to him, was clearly too intimate to be privy to. Bard grimaced awkwardly at him from where he’d abruptly twisted in place in his chair, and Thranduil, without a word, turned away as well. He’d be content to follow Bard’s lead on this one. They’d meddled in their personal lives enough, already.

The laborious shuffling of footsteps finally prompted Thranduil to lift his head from where he’d been poring over the set of chalices and neatly arranging them on the silver-carved tray. Bard made an aborted movement as if he was trying to get to his feet to help them, but one stern shake of the head from Bilbo and he settled back down heavily in his seat. The warrior who’d accompanied them inside reached out with his free hand to drag out the chair opposite Bard, the one which would put the Dwarven king on Thranduil’s immediate right, well within reach of any vengeful attempts at assassination, if he was stupid enough to try that. Bilbo glanced up towards Thranduil once, fleeting and unnoticeable, a blink-and-you-miss moment between them right there and then, but the intent behind those unwavering eyes was clear: _tell me if this is too much_. Thranduil didn’t even realise he hadn’t thought about it when he shook his head softly in a clear no, and Bilbo smiled.

Oakenshield’s face was cast into harsh grim lines, discomfort and pain carved into the regal features of his visage, a once-mighty line of kings thrown into dullness by a shadowed misery. The ever-sputtering flames from the braziers seemed to reach into the glossed waves of his hair, picking out the silver and holding it up to the loyal lamplight, much like a jeweller looking over a gem to see if it passed muster for the royal coronet. His armour glinted occasionally in an absent gesture, like it was trying to remember how to breathe or blink, an eldritch creature not yet accustomed to mortal existence and yet, trying so very hard to slip past suspicion. Orcrist, strapped firmly to the stiff planes of his back, seemed to grin menacingly through the twisting fingers of the light.

Bilbo gently pulled out the chair next to him and slid his frame into the seat. There was something so ridiculously enchanting about the way it all clashed and contrasted and fought for dominance; him, in a simple but clearly Dwarven tunic and trousers, unassuming and soft around the edges, resting his forearms languidly along the same set of carved armrests that had seen age-old wars and heard long-lost battle strategies, sitting in a tent full of people who had all, at one point, valued a stone more than his life. The Durin blues and silver thread grated against the polished gleam of his warm ochres and faded golds. Bilbo’s eyes seemed to shine, yet, there was not a sight of tears anywhere. He knew, better than anyone, that there was no space for weakness here, not again.

The warrior who’d helped his king inside now straightened importantly, moving back a few steps until he stood within range of the somewhat limited vision of his king. One of his hands moved automatically to his side, his palm curving over the pommel of a truly massive double-edged sword hanging at his hip. “I’ll send for Master Dwalin,” he spoke, rough and heavy, like his voice was scratching itself out of his throat. Thranduil watched out of the corner of his eye, running the tip of his index finger over a floral pattern etched along the lip of the pitcher.

Oakenshield nodded curtly, once. “Yes, of course.” The warrior bowed deeply once before him, almost folding himself in half, before he shifted slightly and dropped into a low bow for Bilbo. Bard caught his eye, his mouth slightly tipped open in surprise. Thranduil just shrugged, as surprised as he was. “Thank you.”

“Give our regards to Dáin, please,” Bilbo cut in warmly, and the warrior nodded emphatically, the plates of his armour letting out a musical chime at the movement. “That’ll be all then, thank you.”

The warrior gave both of them another deeply reverential bow, before he smoothed out his spine. With a curt nod towards Bard and an expression at Thranduil that might as well have sliced him into ribbons, the guard left. The Elven guards silently held the ends of the tent open for him to pass through, before they fell back down in a sensual hiss of smooth fabric, a curtain separating them and those, a veneer of birthright painted over people similar to them in every regard but for the iron-edged blood grating through their veins. Oakenshield watched him leave with a sour look curdling his face.

“They’re treating me like I’m going to shatter any second,” he grunted, displeasure writ large and bold across the scowl clouding over his face. Bilbo didn’t even spare him a glance in response to that, although he did reach out his hand and wrap his fingers around his wrist. Bard seemed to be trying not to be too obvious about marvelling over the rune-engraved vambraces stretching over his forearms. Thranduil hid a fond smile.

“Maybe, don’t die next time?” Bilbo told him, off-handed and breezy. One of his shoulders lifted in a small shrug. “I’m sure they’ll treat you normally then.”

“Your Majesty.” Bard cut in smoothly as soon as Oakenshield opened his mouth to respond, his tone polite but decidedly firm in a manner that brooked no argument. Thranduil was glad to note he’d taken the initiative in steering the conversation towards the matter at hand; neither of them were particularly keen on sitting in on a lovers’ quarrel. Oakenshield tilted his head to the side, fixing his gaze upon him, looking almost mildly bemused, as if Bard’s unabashed boldness had caught him off guard in a way he didn’t count himself particularly averse to. “Before we begin, I wish to tell you that the Elvenking and I are overjoyed at seeing you hale and well. It was a most grievous wound that was bestowed upon you, but to see you thus brings comfort and hope to the most tremulous of hearts.”

Oakenshield dipped his head in acknowledgment when Bard finished; one of the braids that wrapped itself and curved into being from behind his left ear slipped free and swung loosely in space with the motion. The heavy bead at the end of it caught the light of the fire and seemed to glow, as if it was still laying in a bed of embers in a forge. His mouth was pressed into an evaluative line. “I accept your gratitude with a warm heart, Bard the Dragon Slayer. Yours, and the Elvenking’s.” Here, his gaze snapped towards Thranduil who’d been quietly bracing himself for the fury he knew he’d be subject to, but Oakenshield’s look hosted no hostility. Instead, he seemed measuring, speculative, calculating, like he was turning over a hundred different outcomes that he could birth from a handful of words in that very moment. He dipped his head into a shallow bow in Thranduil’s direction, and when he raised his head, there was a carefully painted strokes of a fledgling smile upon his face. “Your assistance, o mighty Kings, has been most appreciated.”

To his left, Bard immediately bristled. He didn’t mean to, of course, the man knew he was walking on tiptoes for the last couple of weeks; of all the things he could’ve been, Bard wasn’t a fool. But there must have been something deeply unsettling about the title to him, the rank, the status of it all. Maybe he’d seen enough of war for a lifetime and couldn’t bear the thought of having to bury more friends and family if he proved incompetent enough to stop another. Maybe he despised the pedestal that came with it, the clawing ache to hunt and chase and kill and drink with talons and fangs and knives and axes and goblets encrusted with gems and inlaid with gold and silver. This tent, this company, these liveries, they weren’t meant for him; they’d never been. Bard had never doubted that for a second, but here he was, sitting at a table for kings, partaking in the same misery that permeated the existence of the rest of them. A pig for slaughter, a horse for battle. Born, bred; _created_.

Across from him, Oakenshield’s face split into a vicious smile.

Thranduil leaned forward in his chair, shifting his goblet of wine to the side as he did. He wasn’t about to leave Bard to muck up this cautious limbo of a tentative alliance that they were in, even if it meant sacrificing the strange competition of silence and half-hearted conversation that he and Oakenshield had wordlessly engaged themselves in. He noticed Bilbo shift in place, his fingers visibly tightening around the wrist of the Dwarven king in a silent warning, a quiet affirmation of his presence by his side. Thranduil swallowed down a relieved smile; allies, no matter how hard won, were difficult to come by.

“We are glad to have stood by you and yours to defeat a common enemy,” Thranduil said graciously, folding his hands one over the other on top of the ornate table. At his side, Bard’s shoulders slumped, the movement terribly small, almost as if he was ashamed of the sudden display of his emotions, and to the untrained eye, it might have slipped notice. As it was, Bilbo’s eyes stayed fixed on Thranduil in rapt attention as he studiously took in every single word, but Oakenshield’s gaze snapped towards Bard, gloating and triumphant and all sorts of predatory. “Our differences matter little in the face of a greater evil. We are glad to have been granted the opportunity of assisting in our help to you.”

“Princess Tauriel and Prince Legolas were of indispensable help, King Thranduil.” Bilbo responded to him calmly, the edges of his mouth curving into a fond little smile as he tilted his head to the side in a respectful motion. “I’m sure Prince Kíli and the Royal Healer Oín would like for us to pass on our deepest regards for the same.” He looked towards the King Under the Mountain then, the smile wavering for the smallest of moments before he turned back to Thranduil and let his face split into a tentative grin. “As do I.”

“Of course, Master Baggins, I’ll be happy to let my children know.” Thranduil told him, trying not to dwell for a little too long on the people his daughter and his son were becoming, growing into. It was difficult to walk a few steps through the Elven camp without hearing awed tales being exchanged over guttering campfires of the steel-gazed Captain Tauriel with her arms of stone who cut through scores of Orcs like a silverfish darting in and out of the water, or of the radiant Crown Prince Legolas who danced on nimble feet and wielded his weapons like they were an extension of his gracefully swaying limbs, ever caught in a music that thrummed within the bounds of his blue blood. Enchanting, captivating, sinuous, deadly; one of fire, one of ice; one of rage, one of fury. Commander, captain, prince, monarch; flesh and blood descended from otherworldly beings. Daughter of the forest; the first fresh leaf of spring; his heart and soul and everything in between. Born, raised, _blossomed_.

“I’m aware of Prince Kíli coming across Captain Tauriel a few days ago,” Bilbo continued, his voice pitched in that deliberate range of thoughtful and quietly reminiscent, enough to pull towards him the attention of everyone around the table. He brought his elbow up to rest on the table, cupping the side of his face in his palm as he lazily drummed the fingers of his other hand on Oakenshield’s wrist. “They talked for a while, until Prince Legolas had to fetch her on some other pressing business. Nonetheless, please let both of them know the depth of my gratitude whenever you see them next.”

Oakenshield blinked, once, twice. He turned his head, confusion writ large and bold across his face, and stared at Bilbo. “Kíli talked to her?” He asked, his voice hard as flint stones. At Thranduil’s side, Bard’s face contorted in a painful wince in anticipation of the inevitable. “Why did Kíli talk to her?”

“Because he wanted to thank her and her brother for helping in the healing of his brother and his uncle,” Bilbo answered coolly, but there were the faintest edges of annoyance in his tone. He let go of Oakenshield’s wrist to sling his other elbow up on the table, and laced his fingers together under his chin to smile sweetly at him. “It’s proper etiquette, Thorin. Surely, you know that.”

Thranduil exhaled slowly, trying to draw as little attention towards himself as possible. It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway, judging by the way Oakenshield’s expression had shuttered down faster than storm clouds racing across to drape a veil over the sun at the turn of the seasons. Bard subtly nudged him under the table, his knee knocking against Thranduil’s own; the rough fabric of his trousers scraped against the sweeping silks of his robe, but it wasn’t displeasing, not by a long shot. Instead, Thranduil silently slid a goblet of wine over into his waiting hands. Bard smiled at him as he dipped his head to take a long draught, the moonshine surface of the liquid snagging upon the silvery threads of wisdom and grace that wove through his hair. Thranduil quickly looked away.

“He was not supposed to have been interacting with her without my permission, Bilbo.” Oakenshield said, the note of warning in his voice clear as daylight for anyone to see. Orcrist smiled her toothless, devilish, cruel smile their way. Thranduil fought down a shudder; that was no ordinary weapon, not with the sheer gallons of blood she had guzzled down in all of her life. Steel like that, once anointed, never forgot the lust of a glorious battle. “Kíli should have known better than to be so foolish, so careless. When did this even happen? Why, in Mahal’s name, did no one think to _tell_ me?”

“No one told you because we knew you’d go off on a tangent,” Bilbo shot back, his hands falling back to the top of the table with a harsh thud. His fingers flexed absently, like he was itching to hold onto something for comfort, before he balled them into fists and pressed them into the wood. “You’re always so harsh on him, I’m not going to apologise for trying to take the heat off of him for this.”

“It’s not a tangent.” Oakenshield said simply. His face was carefully impassive, all lines of emotion and personal attachments wiped clear from his visage in favour of playing the part of the righteous king. “Anything and everything he says to any member of the family of kings could be counted as a royal decree, especially when both Fíli and I are otherwise indisposed and rendered incapable of taking diplomatic decisions. He is second in line; his actions and words take monumental precedence over Dáin’s.”

“I know this is war, Thorin.” Bilbo looked furious, enraged in a way they’d seldom seen him but for when he’d shown up at their tent with the Arkenstone in tow, his mouth set in a hard line, the stone worth more than his life clutched in the soot-stained confines of his shaking hands. “Kíli knows what he’s doing. Have a little faith.”

“He’s a _child_.”

“And you raised him.” Bilbo said, level and firm and unmoving. “Didn’t you?”

Oakenshield’s gaze hardened. “The toughest of warriors from the fields of battle can falter when it comes to writing of a calculated peace after the bloodshed. Trained as he may be in the ways of war, he knows nothing of mediation and measured dialogue but the few council meetings he sat in on back at Ered Luin.” He shook his head, and the braid swung once, twice, a half more before settling back into the roaring crests and troughs of his hair. “It’s not enough.”

Bilbo’s lip curved into a hateful little sneer, mirth and rage and disgust all warring for dominance upon the shadowed angles of his face. He leaned forward in his chair, testily, harshly, angrily; the expression he wore was terrible, in every possible sense of the word. “The rightful King Under the Mountain himself was birthed from the throes of adversity. Give him some leeway, Thorin. He happens to be your own flesh and blood.”

“That was a necessity.” Oakenshield bit back instantly, the heavy rings on his fingers glittering as his hands made an aborted movement, like he’d slam them on the table if only he wasn’t wary of what Bilbo would say if he did. “I did not _choose_ to have the crown passed on to me that early.”

Bilbo leered at him, all teeth, all fury. “And you think he did?”

“He had _you_.” Oakenshield snarled, eyes as blue as the ice that dangled from cracked boughs far, far up north, when winter began to swoop in and wrap everything in her way in the malicious embrace of her spidery arms. The line of his jaw stood out sharp and piercing as he grit his teeth, visibly swallowing down the odious spew of rotting anguish and putrid agony from within. His voice shook when he spoke, the mighty king of legend, cut down by the blade of the dead and dying, cursed for eternity to sit by a pool of wealth and hate the reflection of the man that looked back at him from the surface of the ever-rippling gold. It was a pitiful sight. “You— you should have known better than to let him do that.” Oakenshield cleared his throat, visibly reigning in his self in a manner so formal and controlled, it reminded Thranduil of his own court sessions when he was Legolas’ age. “You should’ve made sure he didn’t take any arbitrary actions on his own.”

“ _‘Arbitrary actions’_?” Bilbo repeated, his words pitched high with disbelief. A hysterical burst of laughter exploded from his open mouth, and Oakenshield flinched. “ _Arbitrary_? You mean, things he’d want to do on his own? You’d have me track his movements, make sure he doesn’t accidentally say the _wrong_ thing?”

“It’s for his own good, and the good of everyone under my protection.” Oakenshield answered easily, the answer sliding off readily from the tip of his tongue. “I need to make sure I do what is right.”

Bilbo snorted. The sound was unsettling, discordant, insulting. “Your protection,” he said, and shook his head. “Your _protection_.”

The faint flickers of vulnerability that had settled in across Oakenshield seemed to dissipate, and he pressed his mouth into a displeased line. “I named _you_ to take all executive decisions in my stead, not Dáin, not Balin; _you_. It was _your_ responsibility to ensure Kíli didn’t walk headfirst into a diplomatic incident, and you didn’t even have the care to tell me that it had ever happened when I recovered enough to resume portions of my duties as King. Your sheer negligence might as well have—”

“Don’t you ever,” Bilbo interrupted him, holding up a trembling hand to stop the King Under the Mountain in the middle of his tirade, shaking so furiously and so dreadfully, a distant star about to collapse on itself in a display of agony and beauty, blinding and brilliant and terrible, “ _ever_ , talk to me like that again.”

Oakenshield’s face twisted instantly, contorting into a pained expression of apology and immediate regret. He breathed out slowly, like he was exhaling all the tension and latent fear out of his chest for the time being, and stretched out his hands apprehensively into the space between them. “Bilbo, I,” he whispered, and fell silent.

“I am _not_ one of your subjects, do you understand?” Bilbo said, brusque and direct, pulling his hands away crisply and further into himself. Oakenshield looked devastated at the action, face crumpling with each passing moment of separation, but Bilbo didn’t even spare him a second glance. “I didn’t _ask_ to be abruptly pushed to the forefront and put in charge of cleaning a mess _you_ played a huge part in creating in the first place. I didn’t have time to wrap my head around, around _any_ of this, because I’m not a warrior, alright? I’m not you, and I’m not _like_ you. This is difficult for me because this is not something I’ve ever had to live through before, and I’m still here, trying my _fucking_ best. Do you know why?” Bilbo inhaled sharply, his gaze cutting like diamonds, the braziers’ illumination dancing like pinpricks inside his darkened pupils. He wrenched himself forward, closer to the Dwarven king, until they were a scant few inches apart. “ _Do_ you understand why, Thorin?”

“I love you,” Oakenshield whispered, placing his hand palm-up in the space between them as his voice shook and shook and shook. “I love you; I love you, I do.”

“I did it because there was nobody left.” Bilbo intoned flatly. “ _Nobody_. You’d gone ahead in your heroism-addled haze and named me the Consort, the authority in _your_ incompetence, and that was it. Because _fuck_ everyone else, right? I’ll manage everything. I always do, don’t I?” He chuckled, dry and hoarse and grating. “It’s not like I had to mourn or grieve or take a minute to sit by your side and wait for you to come back to me, anyway.”

Oakenshield finally caved, reaching out to take one of Bilbo’s hands in both of his own, and bowed down as low as he could go. He pressed his lips to his knuckles softly, gently, in apology, in worship, murmuring over and over again. “I love you. Bilbo, I _love_ you.”

“I didn’t ask to have to become King’s _fucking_ Consort of Erebor, just because I have the most experience with talking down an ambition driven king who’s so far gone in his greed, he can’t even see beyond the bounds of his own _goddamned_ madness. So, the next time you want to talk about _responsibility,_ Thorin?” Bilbo said, his frame quivering with weeks and weeks and weeks of frustration and fear and pain and exhaustion. “Think about how you broke your nephews’ hearts, instead.”

Thranduil looked off to the side; Bard had quietly recoiled in his seat, beaten down and trampled, exhaustion sewn into the lines of his shoulders. Thranduil wordlessly reached out a hand beneath the table and laced their fingers together. Bard gave their conjoined hands a grateful squeeze and shot him a grim smile.

How long can a man go on, shoved into the same little cubicle of space, clawing at the walls that close in around him with their tall, imposing selves and their canopy of shadows, murmuring over and over the tales of lost souls who strayed in a maze of disassociation and lost their way, never to be found again? How long can a man go on, scraping at his dirt-packed prison, feeling the granules of mud lodge deep under his fingernails and settle far back in the palate of his screaming mouth as he heaves and coughs and begs and _chokes_ , searching through drowsy-lidded eyes for someone he so, so desperately believes will come to save him? How long can a man go on, trapped in a cage of his lover’s making, watching the lid of his own coffin block out the sun as it falls down upon what he now knows to be his grave, throat long shredded with the cries of a name that doesn’t remember where the voice that calls it is coming from?

The tent was silent, a little haven in a sea of tumult where the frigid reach of winter’s breath could not ghost down their bowed necks. Bard tapped away nervously on the thick carpet spread out beneath their feet, the metal-tipped toe of his boots making a low thunk, thunk, thunk with each disarrayed swing of his leg against the intricately woven fabric. Across from him, Oakenshield sat, stricken and shattered, like someone took a scythe to his heart and tore it to ribbons, flayed him open and laid him out for the carrion to peck and tug and hack and devour until he was naught but a pile of bones and decayed flesh, a legacy befitting the king who gave away his heart to a stone the size of his fist. Bilbo sat with his head down, shoulders shaking slightly under the staggering gravity of all that had transpired and all that had still gone unsaid, his hair shining like copper pennies under the noonday sun sitting in the hot-baked palms of bright-eyed, sweat-stained children, their gap-toothed grins reminding him of the ones his own used to throw his way so, so long ago. Thranduil used his other hand to press the tips of his fingers against the rabbit-swift pulse thrumming at the junction of Bard’s wrist; the man looked up curiously, and Thranduil shook his head softly. Another time, perhaps.

To the side, Bilbo finally lifted his head. Bard startled as he met his gaze; it had been easy, in the face of Oakenshield’s grievous injuries and the wounded stagger to his once-proud and domineering stride, to glance over the effect the war had had on soft-eyed, soft-smiled, soft-voiced Bilbo Baggins. His eyes were dry, like he’d scraped them rid of tears a long, long time ago, like he’d taken a dagger to his face to cut out every last bit of the openness, the kindness that had made up so large a part of him once; there he sat, bloodshot and exhausted, bruised and painted with scratches and scabbing wounds, but still certain, still himself.

“Thorin,” he began heavily, and cleared his throat. Oakenshield raised his head from where he was still devoutly bent over Bilbo’s hand in his own, giving him a shaky smile of encouragement. Bilbo opened his mouth to continue when Oakenshield pressed a soft kiss to his knuckles, a mere whisper of his softly murmuring mouth to his flayed and torn flesh, and Bilbo’s voice _splintered_.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered quietly, his words soaked with unshed tears, his frame shaking and shaking and buckling under the unspoken and unexpressed agony that had plagued his every step in the last few weeks. “Thorin, I’m _so_ sorry. That was— you don’t deserve to hear that. You did your best, and that’s all that should matter. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

Oakenshield shook his head lightly, a few errant locks of his hair sliding free and splaying over and across the heavy rune-encrusted planes of his breastplate. The curve of his mouth was apprehensive in the face of his forwardness, but the sentiment was heart-achingly genuine. Thranduil hadn’t expected him to ever be this open, this honest. “We both overstepped, I know. I’m not your king. I do not command you, and I must remember that.” He chuckled under his breath, a little sound of sheer exhaustion permeated into the very core of his being. “I am no one to tell you what your responsibility to me and to Erebor is. You’ve already done your part a thousand times over. I could not possibly ask more of you.”

“You won’t be asking if I’m offering.” Bilbo told him gently, and laid his other hand on top of Oakenshield’s. “Thorin, you have to know. I don’t begrudge doing this, any of this—” he waved a hand vaguely, as if he could hope to encompass all of that in one fell swoop, “if you’re by my side. Alone?” He threaded their fingers together, pressing the pads of his own into the flat of the Dwarven king’s. “I’m torn in two.”

“I’m sorry.” Oakenshield breathed out, like a plea, like a prayer, like he’d be kneeling prostrate if it weren’t for the wound across his chest, like he’d sing in hymns of his deepest sins and his most malicious thoughts if only Bilbo asked. He lowered his head, down, down, down, until he was bowing before his lover, his forehead pressed to their joined hands. “I’m sorry, Bilbo. I will do better. I promise, I’ll do better.”

“So will I.” Bilbo said, and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. Oakenshield _folded_ into his embrace, and Bilbo quietly tucked his chin over the curve of his head. He smoothed a hand down his back, over the cruel lines of his formidable armour, his mouth turned into a speculative frown. “I’m just not sure if I can do this again on my own, even if you asked me to.”

“No, you won’t have to be alone.” Oakenshield said firmly, pulling away and making a valiant effort to hide the flicker of pain that darted across his face at the sudden movement. Bilbo immediately reached out to hold his wrist, and the Dwarven king smiled. “You won’t, not again. Fíli, Kíli and Balin will be there to help, no matter what, I promise you that.”

Bilbo quirked a brow. “I was counting on you to say _you’d_ be there with me.”

Oakenshield’s face split into a smirk. “Now you’re just being unreasonable.”

“Keep that ill-omened mouth of yours shut.” Bilbo said with a roll of his eyes, shoving him lightly in the shoulder. Oakenshield leaned back in the chair, laughing quietly under his breath, radiance shot through every last expanse of his expression, his head angled backwards to lean against the wooden rest behind him. “I appreciate that you’re uncaring of an audience, but I, for one, still have a reputation to uphold.”

“Oh, _come on_.” Oakenshield groaned, lifting a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, his eyes screwed shut in blatant exasperation. He waved his other hand broadly in the direction of Bard and Thranduil, dismissive yet mindful of their presence in his conversation. “They’ve seen me at my lowest, and I, them. What more could we possibly do to make it worse than three gold-sick, greed infested kings squabbling like children over a pile of pretty pennies?”

“You could keep _talking_ ,” Bilbo grumbled under his breath, but Bard had already moved forward in his chair, the intent and purpose etched large across his face. His hand fell away from Thranduil’s as he cleared his throat carefully, cautiously. The King Under the Mountain and his Consort both glanced up at him together, Bilbo looking mildly inquisitive, Oakenshield grim, like he knew where the conversation would be steering itself soon enough.

“I understand that we’ve never formally and personally apologised for our words and actions during the siege of Erebor,” Bard began stiffly, his shoulders braced for impact, as if he expected Oakenshield to draw Orcrist and cleave him open from mouth to navel for daring to bring it up. Nonetheless, he persevered, his jaw set in a harsh line, lips creased in careful consideration of his next words. “I would like to take this opportunity to express our deepest, most profound apologies for our deeds.” He exhaled through gritted teeth, shaking his head to himself. “Perhaps it is best to discuss this before we proceed with the possibility of furthering our alliance.”

Oakenshield looked at him, speaking nothing, and tilted his head.

Thranduil was aware that he had a fatal flaw. More often than not, he’d underestimated those that stood in opposition to him and his ideas. Perhaps, it was a prerogative he’d acquired because of the endless stretch of his existence and the immitigable flow of constancy that came with it. There was always a pattern, always a certainty to the way the universe unfolded: war and death and ruin preceded peace and life and plenty, until all that goodness came to a head and the tide of darkness swelled high enough to blot out the light. It was a cycle, an unending ouroboros, a meaningless and meaningful iteration that he was trapped in, and sometimes, he let his exhaustion seep into the clear vision he’d always been expected to keep. Sometimes, he looked over people, thought of them to behave in a certain manner and was surprised when they didn’t; that was his constant, that was a failing of his own making. It helped, often, like a little game he played to keep himself occupied; _let’s see if they do what I want them to do, let’s see if they act like I want them to act_. Let’s see what I’ll do if they do what I didn’t.

To his right, Oakenshield— King Under the Mountain, a hero of legend, a monarch of honour and duty and diligence; observant, whip-smart, hawk-eyed, silver-tongued Thorin Oakenshield; son of Thráin, son of Thrór; intelligent, calculating, manipulative, fierce, demanding Oakenshield; the Dwarven king who’d come so far and done so much because his veins pulsed with vengeance and not blood— simply sat back in his chair and turned to the Hobbit sitting at his side.

“Bilbo?” He said, instead.

Bilbo Baggins steepled his fingers under his chin and leaned forward. “That is a strongly worded statement, Bard.”

Bard shrugged. This close, it wasn’t hard to make out the taut lines of his back from under his battered brown coat. “They were strongly worded deeds.”

“You realise we’ll hold you to it?” Bilbo asked, his voice astoundingly level, considering the fact that he was deliberating upon an incident that had very nearly lost him his own life. Oakenshield was sitting back, his arms folded stiffly over his chest, absolutely content with handing over the reins to his Consort in this particular interaction. Bilbo’s expression didn’t falter, the blank look making him appear decidedly sharper, more defined around the edges. Thranduil couldn’t shake the feeling of discomfort, of the sinking realisation that all this time, they’d been seeing him through a veil, like they’d only caught occasional glimpses of him in passing from the rippling surface of a lake; like the man sitting before them now was somehow different, stronger, holding so much more power than they’d ever assumed him to have. “Do not speak of upholding an alliance and honouring a trade partnership if you have intentions of turning on Erebor at the first chance of greater power.”

Bard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I do not care for greater power.”

“Neither did I,” Bilbo said calmly, his delicate shoulders lifting in a listless shrug of feigned nonchalance. Thranduil watched as Oakenshield followed the little action, fondly, alertly, hungrily; one would have to be blind to miss the pride in his eyes. Bilbo crossed his forearms, folded them one on top of the other, drumming the fingers of his right hand casually on the top of the polished table. “But there are times when you must assume that power, if it means protecting those who look towards you for strength.”

Bard couldn’t quite mask his frown this time, visibly unsettled by the implications of that sentence. “I can assure you, Bilbo, my ambitions have never been more simple. I care for nothing more than ensuring the health and prosperity of my people.”

“‘ _Bleed in peace, and dream to prosper_.’” Bilbo said quietly, almost as if he were talking to himself, but Thranduil cottoned on to the way his eyes never once left Bard’s, never shifted one inch to the side. Oakenshield idly traced the shorn edges of his beard, the lamplight catching off the metal of his gauntlets. “How can you want for prosperity when you claim your ambitions are stagnant? Can there exist plenty, without necessity of sacrifice in one or the other way?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Bard said.

Bilbo smiled. “I think you do.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Bard told him plainly, brusquely, directly, as was his manner. King of the masses, king from the masses, Thranduil thought. His mouth was turned into a displeased scowl. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that my people are starving and homeless with nowhere to go. I am king, unwilling as I may be, of vagabonds. I have no office to speak of, but I will do everything in my power to provide for them.”

“These are your words, not mine.” Bilbo answered coolly, and Thranduil saw the sudden start of realisation of the exact moment Bard realised what he’d just made him admit to. “Things have a funny way of circling back to the topic at hand, don’t they?”

Bard’s scowl was decidedly pronounced now, his face twisted in begrudging acceptance of what he’d been walked into. “If things do come to a head as you suggest, if there is an instance where my children are in mortal peril,” here, his gaze snapped sharply upwards, as if he was daring the King Under the Mountain and his Consort to disagree, as if he himself wasn’t sure what he’d do if it came down to it, “I will call upon Erebor for aid, regardless of whether you will grant it to me or not. My dignity and my entreaties matter nothing to me.”

“Us,” Oakenshield said.

Bard blinked. “Pardon me?”

“ _Us_ , not _me_ ,” Oakenshield told him, grinning crookedly as he curved a ring on his index finger over and over, the dark stone set into it gleaming dully as it hit the light. His teeth shone wickedly. “An alliance is no place big enough for the pride of a king.”

Bilbo’s face cracked into a smile. Thranduil knew, Bard had given the right answer.

Bard shrugged, but the relief was palpable on his face. He bowed shallowly to both of them, a mock parody of the gesture, and it seemed to loosen some of the tension from Oakenshield’s shoulders. Bilbo was already smiling a little fondly. “No. No, it isn’t. But perhaps, our apologies will be given room enough to have a presence of their own.”

“Your apology,” Thranduil said, softly, firmly, affirmatively. “Not mine.”

Bard’s expression crushed in on itself. “ _Thranduil_ ,” he said quietly, pleading, “please.”

“I appreciate your show of solidarity, Bard, I really do,” Thranduil told him, gathering the sleeves of his robes and delicately folding them in his lap. Oakenshield’s expression was caught somewhere between disappointment and expectation; Bilbo just looked terrified, his hand curved like a manacle over Oakenshield’s wrist. “But I ask this of you: the next time you head out to forge an alliance, be careful not to speak on behalf of another king. They will not be as forgiving as I am.”

“This could be a new age,” Bard said. “A new beginning.”

“And I would welcome it with open arms,” Thranduil answered solemnly, feeling the start of a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. Bard’s demeanour, his earnest sincerity in making sure the Greenwood wasn’t left behind in the chariot of their future— it was ridiculously endearing; enchanting, even. “But when there exists a history so stained with malcontent and hatred, it becomes rather difficult to wipe the slate clean and start afresh.”

“It’s stained with the blood of my people, Thranduil.” Oakenshield smiled at him, cutting-edged, blade-swift. “So are your hands.”

“Everyone who came in the vicinity of the cursed mountain fell under her dreadful spell,” Thranduil went on. He’d had plenty of experience dealing with Dwarves; there was little in the world that held as much pleasure as glossing over their hot heads and watching them rile up, twisted and wound and ready to rip and tear and shred to bits. Oakenshield, however, merely remained seated, watching him speak with dark eyes and that haunting smile. “Its siren call is the reason we were driven to do what we did.”

Bard blinked, thrown off-course for a moment by the way his words ended. “Yes.”

“So,” Thranduil said, raising a hand to hold his goblet up to his lips, feeling the soft scratch of its engravings digging into his flesh. “Unless the King Under the Mountain expresses his remorse to us about the actions _he_ was compelled to undertake against us, I will not weigh my apology in with yours.”

Bard immediately blanched. Oakenshield’s smile only grew wider.

Bilbo frowned from his place. “I do not blame Thorin for what happened.”

“Yet, you blame him for what he did.” Thranduil smiled at him, saccharine and bright, encouraging in its entirety. He took a sip of the wine, swirling his tongue lightly in his mouth to let the flavour seep in, all the time feeling Bard’s eyes digging into the side of his head. “You are not accorded sufficient credit for your loyalty to the King Under the Mountain, Master Baggins. The depth of your emotions is, truly, astounding.”

“I don’t hold him accountable.”

“But you know he is guilty.” Thranduil shrugged, holding up the goblet and pressing it lazily to his temple. “And as long as you live, you will never be able to forgive him, in your heart, for weighing your life and finding it worth less than the value of a stone.”

“He didn’t have a choice,” Bilbo said curtly.

Thranduil smiled at him, all teeth, predatory, ravenous, and took a long sip. “Pray tell, your highness,” he crooned gently, tipping his goblet in their direction in a toast, “how would _you_ know?”

“ _Stop that_.” Bilbo growled, slamming his fist down on the wooden surface so hard it rattled Bard’s untouched goblet off to the side. He pointed a trembling finger towards Thranduil, his other hand slipping free from Oakenshield’s wrist to rest upon the heavy belt that wrapped itself over his stomach in an instinctual, knee-jerk reaction. Thranduil had no doubts that Bilbo could wield a blade as well as he could use his venom-laced tongue, cutting not deep enough to wound but slashing just far enough to bleed. “You fucking stop that, right _now_. Don’t fuck with my head, Thranduil. I don’t have enough patience to deal with that.”

“And yet, you haven’t drawn your weapon.” Thranduil pointed out graciously, gesturing with his chin at the heavy tunic that he wore. “A hunting knife, I’ll wager. You’re not very experienced with it, but you’re willing to use it immediately in defence of your king.” He tipped the chalice from side to side, watching attentively as the molten silver of the wine lapped at the edges of the cup, like waves breaking over the sea-facing promontory on a night of the full moon. He glanced upwards, mouth drawn taut in a grin. “Sentimental value, then. Gifted in the throes of sickness, perhaps? Maybe, a present passed on from the deathbed?”

Bilbo’s face warped into a boiling concoction of rage and sheer, unadulterated hatred. “Fuck you,” he spat, shaking so violently it made his spine shudder. “ _Fuck you_ , Thranduil.”

“Bilbo,” Oakenshield called.

“He’s _not_ my fucking king.” Bilbo snarled at him, lip curled backwards to expose teeth. “Don’t you speak about me that way, ever again.”

“ _Bilbo_.” Oakenshield snapped, sharp, furious. “That’s enough.”

“How Thorin and I sort out the business of his gold sickness is none of your concern, Thranduil.” Bilbo sneered, so harsh that it made Oakenshield flinch from where he was still sitting, ashen, off to the side. “Keep your games to yourself. We can handle ourselves.”

“Don’t delude yourself, your highness.” Thranduil said coldly, putting the goblet back on the edge of the table with a thud. He shifted closer, his hair gathered over one shoulder like the tail of a golden serpent that had coiled around his chest, ready to unhinge its jaw and swallow him whole. “You have no control over this situation. You never have. If you’re left to your own devices, if the reins of this making are handed to you, we might as well prepare ourselves for the worst.”

“How dare you.” Bilbo whispered, breathing hard, breathing heavy as he stared at Thranduil, processing everything that he’d just said and all that he hadn’t. His hands shook, as did his voice when he spoke. He truly was a clever one. “How _dare_ you.”

“He has hurt you before.” Thranduil told him bluntly, seeing no point in beating around the bush, not when they were already at the stage of laying it all out on the line. “Can you truly say he will not harm you again?”

“I would rather,” Oakenshield said, bleached dry and blood-bereft, drained beyond measure, drained beyond grief, his body wracked with tremors from head to toe, “run my sword through my heart with my own hands, than lay a single finger on him in my gold-driven rage.”

“Like I said, your majesty,” Thranduil answered, moving backwards to cross one leg over the other, “prepare for the worst.”

“You need to keep out of other people’s business, _Elvenking_.” Bilbo hissed, vile and vicious, a wild abomination poised on its haunches to rip out of the throat of any, man, bird or beast, that dared to stand in its way. He rose to his feet, hands braced upon the wood for support, for strength. A grounding anchor, Thranduil noted gleefully. “Do not presume to know beyond the bounds of your immediate concerns, as of this moment. It is time you stayed in your _fucking_ lane.”

“This is my lane, your highness.” Thranduil replied lazily, sweeping out his hand in the direction of the tent flaps, gesturing to the hastily stitched dredges of peace that stretched out beyond it. “In case it has slipped your notice, the incident that happened on the ramparts was not a little domestic that you could’ve brushed off as a family matter. No; thousands of people— Men, Dwarves and Elves alike— were privy to it.” He rapped the knuckles of his right hand smartly, sharply against the wood; tap, tap, tap, it went. “So, if you still think this is a business unconcerning the lives of everyone in the vicinity of your kingdom, you need to take a closer look around you. Perhaps there is something that clouds your judgment.”

“Bilbo,” Oakenshield cut in sternly. He looked up at the Hobbit whose chest was heaving with fury. Thranduil didn’t need to observe too closely to see the terror woven through the flesh that held him together. In the blue and silver Dwarven outfit and the unabashed rage painted across his face, he looked unmistakably, irrevocably, like one of Durin’s own. “Bilbo, please.” Oakenshield insisted, his voice much softer now. He wrapped his hand around Bilbo’s, gently tugging him towards himself. “Amrâlimê, _please_ , sit down.”

“It’s funny how the King Under the Mountain is the voice of reason, for once.” Thranduil remarked, just as Bilbo slumped down heavily in his chair. Bard’s hand went up to his temple, quietly digging his fingertips into his forehead to alleviate the impending headache, and Thranduil smiled to himself. Just another small nudge, then. He hadn’t counted on Oakenshield being the one to hold out this long; it was a most pleasant surprise. “I’m sure that tradition went out the window in the days of the old king, yes?”

“ _Thranduil_.” Bard spat through his teeth. “Stop that. Just, just _stop_ it, please.”

“Out of everyone present here, I am the only one who had the distinct pleasure of dealing with King Thrór of legend. King Oakenshield was too young to have been allowed in on the higher meetings, so to speak.” He took a deep, deliberate swig, and ran his tongue over his lips innocently. “Is it not my duty to draw the comparisons I can see between the old and the new, provide as much help as I can?”

“Thorin,” Bilbo said, sharp-tongued, blade-eyed, “is not his grandfather.”

“Is that not something he should be saying, instead?” Thranduil asked.

“You,” Bilbo sneered, “need to learn some _goddamned_ respect.”

“And you, your highness,” Thranduil smiled, tilting his face to rest along his fist, “need to grow a spine.”

“Thranduil, please.” Bard sighed, exhausted. His face was drawn, pale and haggard, hair rough and falling heavy around his shoulders. His beard seemed to scrape against the very ether as he shook his head in disbelief, in failure and incomprehension. “Why do you want to make this difficult? Isn’t putting aside our differences and moving forward with our alliance the purpose, here?”

“I do not believe in sweeping my worries under the rug for someone else to deal with, Bard the Bowman.” Thranduil intoned smoothly, seeing a sudden flash of hurt dart across Bard’s face for a swift-footed moment before it hunkered down into his usual grim and affectedly stoic demeanour. “If my children are to inherit my throne one day, they deserve to know their father made an attempt— ill-fated, perhaps; undoubtedly foolish, yes. But they must know I tried to iron out an age-old feud, and they must know it was for them, and for them alone.”

“You cannot even begin to dream of what it means to have an ill fate, son of Oropher.” Oakenshield said, laughing mirthlessly under his breath, as if he couldn’t imagine Thranduil trying to understand the plight of the living, as if Thranduil hadn’t spent millennia trying to sew up the wounds in his chest that never seemed to heal, no matter how many years slipped through his lax fingers. “You will never know what your apathy did to my people, to the children born in the ruin you brought upon us. You catch a fancy for the living, don’t you? But then you forget of yourself, as always, and death comes swifter than you can ever imagine.” He smirked, his gaze snapping towards Bard for a second, and he let out a hollow chuckle. The little braid swung, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. “You’re a faithless woodland sprite, o mighty mighty Elvenking, and try as you may, faithless you shall remain.”

“Your Dwarves and your myopic vision of the world never ceases to amaze me.” Thranduil laughed, but the sound was empty, scraped out, like there was a gaping cavity in his chest he couldn’t ever hope to fill. “Tell me, _King_ Under the Mountain, when you blame me for the ruin of your people, do you factor in the fire drake, or is that another one of my otherworldly apparitions? When you talk of the destruction that befell you, do you also count the people I lost because the walls of _your_ kingdom couldn’t hold him back, because _your_ king couldn’t look away from his treasure long enough to see what he had become? Or is that my fault, as well?”

“They starved to death, Thranduil.” Oakenshield said, hoarse and heavy, weighed down by the ash-riven memories and the fire-scorched reminiscences of his youth. “They starved to death, and they bled to death, and you stood by and you watched, and you did _nothing_.”

“I sent you help.”

“How _dare_ you lie.” Oakenshield whispered, stricken, his eyes wide with horror, with guilt and fear and pain and agony and all manners of terrible, gnawing, clawing fingers shoved halfway down his constricted throat. “How _dare_ you desecrate the memory of their end with your untruths. Is there no compassion, no kindness in your stone cold heart for the ones that died, because of you?”

“I sent you help, Your Majesty,” Thranduil said, patient as ever. “And your grandfather turned it away.”

Oakenshield’s face paled, like someone had impaled him through the heart, gutted him like a fish, thrown out his innards as a treat for wild beasts. The tent was deathly silent, a shroud of the past slowly settling in over them, stifling and scuffling and choking. Bard turned towards Thranduil, horrified, his mouth open on an unspoken question. Thranduil reached out a hand and took Bard’s into his own.

“You’re lying.” Bilbo finally said, his voice high and strangulated, almost a breathless wheeze. “You’re lying, you have to be.”

“He was angry,” Thranduil told them measuredly, his eyes fixed upon the Dwarven king’s eerily blank face as he continued. “So, so angry. Enraged, furious, frothing. We’d abandoned him, he said. He argued with the emissaries I’d sent, demanded for us to use our forces to support what remained of your people in a final attack against the drake.”

“And you refused,” Bard said quietly.

“When the strongest and most efficient army in all of Middle Earth couldn’t stop him,” Thranduil said, smiling bitterly. “What chance had we, but that of certain death?”

“He never told me,” Oakenshield spoke, softly. He looked devastated, shattered beyond belief, his being splayed across the earth in venom-tipped shards. “All that time talking about alliances and the wrongs done to him and his, and he never once told me.”

“Your father tried to reason with him, I was told.” Thranduil offered, a little hesitantly, watching as Oakenshield appeared to draw further into himself with each word. “He was a kind being, but empathy cannot dare stand before the will of a king.”

“Every day.” Oakenshield said roughly, voice scratched and torn and ripped to pieces, dashed against rocks of his own making, drowned in a sea of his own anguish. “Every day, I speak prayers until I’m hoarse and ache to see my own self when I look in the mirror. But he is a part of me. He is me, and I, him.”

“He is part of you because you are his blood, and he is yours.” Thranduil interrupted, exchanging an uneasy look with Bard as Bilbo slowly reached out to slip his fingers through the Dwarven king’s. Oakenshield, his head bowed and shoulders weak as a newborn colt’s, didn’t even seem to notice. “This is no time to dwell on the past. Whatever happened, whether you choose to see it as good or bad, for better or for worse, is behind you.”

Oakenshield lifted his head. His eyes were bloodshot, face streaked with glass-carved stoicism. It unsettled Thranduil, how much he resembled him in that moment. The notion was, surprisingly, very discomfiting. “The king I had chosen to follow into death was not the man I believed him to be.”

“They rarely are.” Thranduil said frankly. “That is the very concept of kingship, is it not? You take a common man and you strip him of his humanity so he can sit atop a throne and take decisions that others could never dare to, make choices that would curdle blood to ash. The man who wears a crown upon his head often forgets who he was without the weight of it on his brow. Do not blame yourself for not knowing what your grandfather had become; it was not of your making.”

“He caused the death of so many, so _many_ innocent people.”

“As did you.” Thranduil emphasised, not even blinking when Oakenshield’s face flashed with remorse. “You were under the thrall of madness; so was he. The only difference is, youwere one who fell prey to the mountain’s song. Thrór sang along with it.”

“So, it’s true?” Oakenshield demanded stonily, his face like thunder breaking over clear blue skies. He rested both forearms on the table and hunched forward as much as his wound would allow, the frivolous dance of shadows deep-set upon his sallow face. “Do not lie to me now, Thranduil, I do not think I will be able to hear of another betrayal from him, again. The jewels of Lasgalen, were they rightfully yours?”

“I have loved, and I have lost.” Thranduil said. “There is little in this world I hold dearer than things past, memories I can think back on and cherish within reach of my arms. I had heard of the fame of Dwarven skill with precious crafts, and wished for nothing more but to refashion the jewels of my wife so I could have them crafted for both of my children. They are too young to remember her, I thought, and perhaps a reminder would suffice.”

“A _liar_.” Oakenshield whispered, grieving, mourning, aching all at once. “A liar, and a common _thief_.”

“A king,” Thranduil said, “whose ambition grew far beyond his ability to keep a leash on it.”

“Don’t _defend_ him.” Oakenshield snapped, fingers clenching into fists in a split second. Out of the corner of his eye, Thranduil saw Bard shift slightly in his chair, moving closer to him; he looked at Bard, and shook his head subtly. “Don’t you ever, _ever_ defend him.”

“I’m not defending him.”

“What are you even trying to prove?” Oakenshield snarled, struggling so hard to keep his valour from sliding off. “That I’m not like my grandfather? Son of Thráin, son of Thrór, the madness flows in your blood?”

“You are not your grandfather,” Thranduil said calmly, tipping his head to the side in appraisal. Bilbo shot him a warning glare from behind the Dwarven king, and Bard’s hand tightened in his own. “You have never been your grandfather. You need to accept that, before you move forward and assume your mantle as the rightful king of Erebor.”

Oakenshield looked at him. The frigid colour of his eyes was just that; a colour, one shade of endless ice blue, like splintered fractals arranged in a tentative circle of blinding light. There was no hostility, no resentment, no betrayal simmering in his gaze; it was blank, wiped clean, scraped out, completely empty. He’d pushed all of that down for this one minute, for this one conversation, and Thranduil suddenly felt like he was standing on the edge of a precipice, that no matter how hard he tried, he could never see the end of it.

“What do you suggest we do?” Oakenshield asked, instead.

“Get failsafes in place as soon as you can.” Thranduil answered, prompt, prepared. “I realise there is a lot more on your minds right now, but get someone you trust explicitly on this. Make sure you implement laws into place, effective _immediately_. Keep your nephews in on the loop, start preparing them for what might just be something all of Durin’s blood will have to battle with.”

“A curse.”

“A _sickness_ ,” Bilbo snapped. “ _Don’t_ fucking do this to yourself.”

“I will not presume to understand what the dynamics of your family are,” Thranduil said. “But keep informed as many people you truly, really have faith in. Don’t break news of it to the people just yet. They’re looking to you for leadership. Don’t show them a king who can barely stand without stooping before his weaknesses.”

“Give them something to look forward to,” Bard suggested, a little apprehensively. He glanced towards Thranduil once, and he nodded in encouragement. He straightened himself, rolling his shoulders back carefully as he propped himself up a little higher. “A coronation, a celebration, anything to get their minds off the horrors of what has already happened.”

“Gandalf is working upon the gold as we speak,” Bilbo added, looking to each of them one by one. “He took special leave from me to enter the mountain before anyone else.”

“In the meantime, let us fortify what we have left,” Bard said, nodding to himself. “Set up combined guard patrol duties, increase shifts with the healers.”

“Set up a coordinated system of pooling resources,” Bilbo hummed under his breath. “Send out groups in regular shifts to hunt and forage. The combined expertise might just work better before winter makes the valley uninhabitable.”

“We’ll need as much help we can get to assist the teams I’ve already assigned to look into the structural integrity of the mountain,” Oakenshield said, turning to look at Thranduil. “Do you think you and Bard could spare a few people to help scope out the place? We could get to work clearing out the rubble and rebuilding as soon as possible.”

Thranduil bowed his head respectfully. “I would be honoured to.”

Oakenshield slanted his frame towards him for a mere moment, shallow, but still an acknowledgment. It would take time, he knew that; heaven knows he’d think of Oakenshield as a fool if he’d pushed aside all of their differences and extended to him the courtesy of friendship after one terrible, terrible meeting. Progress was slow, progress was careful, and Thranduil had all the time in the world. Eternity was long, reconciliation longer. Would Legolas and Tauriel sit at this same table one day, wearing crowns and coronets that shone with gems of starlight, one fire and one ice, and rest easy knowing their father did what he did for them? Would they think him selfish if they knew they were what centred his actions; would they forgive his apathy if they knew of his love?

To his side, Bard tangled their fingers together; his smile, when their eyes met, was _beautiful_. Thranduil wondered, would he sing for him, if only he asked?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> before we talk about anything else, yes, the characters are flawed. yes, i've made changes to the plotline. yes, bilbo and thorin are both furious at each other. yes, their anger is justified in some aspects. yes, their anger is unjustified in others. no, i will not elaborate ❤️  
> in other news, i've been busy and really, really stressed. my father tested positive for coronavirus, but he's back to normal now, so thank god for that. i got into the best college in the entire country and i'll be starting as an english honours student in one month's time. i'm going to become very busy now, but i'll see if i can sneak in any updates in the meantime. take care, stay safe, drop your comments and kudos because getting to know you and your thoughts makes me so, so happy. i hope you enjoyed the chapter!  
> drop by my twitter and tumblr. links are in my bio!

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on [twitter.](https://twitter.com/yehkyakardiya?s=09)  
> i'm also available on [tumblr.](https://yehkyakardiya.tumblr.com/)


End file.
